Bloomberg made me digest these graphics slowly

Ask the experts to name the success metric of good data visualization, and you will receive a dozen answers. The field doesn't have an all-encompassing metric. A useful reference is Andrew Gelman and Antony Urwin (2012) in which they discussed the tradeoff between beautiful and informative, which derives from the familiar tension between art and science.

For a while now, I've been intrigued by metrics that measure "effort". Some years ago, I described the concept of a "return on effort" in this post. Such a metric can be constructed like the dominating financial metric of return on investment. The investment here is an investment of time, of attention. I strongly believe that if the consumer judges a data visualization to be compelling, engaging or  ell constructed, s/he will expend energy to devour it.

Imagine grub you discard after the first bite, compared to the delicious food experienced slowly, savoring every last bit.

I'm writing this post while enjoying the September issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, which focuses on the upcoming U.S. Presidential election. There are various graphics infused into the pages of the magazine. Many of these graphics operate at a level of complexity above what typically show up in magazines, and yet I spent energy learning to understand them. This response, I believe, is what visual designers should aim for.

***

Today, I discuss one example of these graphics, shown on the right. You might be shocked by the throwback style of these graphics. They look like they arrived from decades ago!

Grayscale, simple forms, typewriter font, all caps. Have I gone crazy?

The article argues that a town like Ambridge in Beaver County, Pennslyvania may be pivotal in the November election. The set of graphics provides relevant data to understand this argument.

It's evidence that data visualization does not need whiz-bang modern wizardry to excel.

Let me focus on the boxy charts from the top of the column. These:

These charts solve a headache with voting margin data in the U.S.  We have two dominant political parties so in any given election, the vote share data split into three buckets: Democratic, Republican, and a catch-all category that includes third parties, write-ins, and none of the above. The third category rarely exceeds 5 percent.  A generic pie chart representation looks like this:

Stacked bars have this look:

In using my Trifecta framework (link), the top point is articulating the question. The primary issue here is the voting margin between the winner and the second-runner-up, which is the loser in what is typically a two-horse race. There exist two sub-questions: the vote-share difference between the top two finishers, and the share of vote effectively removed from the pot by the remaining candidates.

Now, take another look at the unusual chart form used by Bloomberg:

The catch-all vote share sits at the bottom while the two major parties split up the top section. This design demonstrates a keen understanding of the context. Consider the typical outcome, in which the top two finishers are from the two major parties. When answering the first sub-question, we can choose the raw vote shares, or the normalized vote shares. Normalizing shifts the base from all candidates to the top two candidates.

The Bloomberg chart addresses both scales. The normalized vote shares can be read directly by focusing only on the top section. In an even two-horse race, the top section is split by half - this holds true regardless of the size of the bottom section.

This is a simple chart that packs a punch.

 

Making better pie charts if you must

I saw this chart on an NYU marketing twitter account:

The graphical design is not easy on our eyes. It's just hard to read for various reasons.

The headline sounds like a subject line from an email.

The subheaders are long, and differ only by a single word.

Even if one prefers pie charts, they can be improved by following a few guidelines.

First, start the first sector at the 12-oclock direction. Like this:

The survey uses a 5-point scale from "Very Good" to "Very Bad". Instead of using five different colors, it's better to use two extreme colors and shading. Like this:

I also try hard to keep all text horizontal.

For those who prefers not to use pie charts, a side-by-side bar chart works well.

In my article for DataJournalism.com, I outlined "unspoken rules" for making various charts, including pie charts.

 

 

 

When the pie chart is more complex than the data

The trading house, Charles Schwab, included the following graphic in a recent article:

This graphic is more complicated than the story that it illustrates. The author describes a simple scenario in which an investor divides his investments into stocks, bonds and cash. After a stock crash, the value of the portfolio declines.

The graphic is a 3-D pie chart, in which the data are encoded twice, first in the areas of the sectors and then in the heights of the part-cylinders.

As readers, we perceive the relative volumes of the part-cylinders. Volume is the cross-sectional area (i.e. of the base) multipled by the height. Since each component holds the data, the volumes are proportional to the squares of the data.

Here is a different view of the same data:

This "bumps chart" (also called a slopegraph) shows clearly the only thing that drives the change is the drop in stock prices. Because the author assumes no change in bonds or cash, the drop in the entire portfolio is completely accounted for by the decline in stocks. Of course, this scenario seems patently unrealistic - different investment asset classes tend to be correlated.

***

A cardinal rule of data visualization is that the visual should be less complex than the data.

Make your color legend better with one simple rule

The pie chart about COVID-19 worries illustrates why we should follow a basic rule of constructing color legends: order the categories in the way you expect readers to encounter them.

Here is the chart that I discussed the other day, with the data removed since they are not of concern in this post. (link)

First look at the pie chart. Like me, you probably looked at the orange or the yellow slice first, then we move clockwise around the pie.

Notice that the legend leads with the red square ("Getting It"), which is likely the last item you'll see on the chart.

This is the same chart with the legend re-ordered:

***

Simple charts can be made better if we follow basic rules of construction. When used frequently, these rules can be made silent. I cover rules for legends as well as many other rules in this Long Read article titled "The Unspoken Conventions of Data Visualization" (link).

When the visual runs away from the data

The pressure of the coronavirus news cycle has gotten the better of some graphics designers. Via Twitter, Mark B sent me the following chart:

I applied the self-sufficiency test to this pie chart. That's why you can't see the data which were also printed on the chart.

The idea of self-sufficiency is to test how much work the visual elements of the graphic are doing to convey its message. Look at the above chart, and guess the three values are.

Roughly speaking, all three answers are equally popular, with perhaps a little less than a third of respondents indicating "Getting It" as their biggest COVID-19 worry.

If measured, the slices represent 38%, 35% and 27%.

Now, here is the same chart with the data:

Each number is way off! In addition, the three numbers sum to 178%.

This is an example of the Visual being at odds with the Data, using a Trifecta Checkup analysis. (Read about the Trifecta here.)

What the Visual is saying is not the same as what the data are saying. So the green arrow between D and V is broken.

***

This is a rather common mistake. This survey question apparently allows each respondent to select more than one answers. Whenever more than one responses are accepted, one cannot use a pie chart.

Here is a stacked bar chart that does right by the data.

 

Pie chart conventions

I came across this pie chart from a presentation at an industry meeting some weeks ago:

This example breaks a number of the unspoken conventions on making pie charts and so it is harder to read than usual.

Notice that the biggest slice starts around 8 o'clock, and the slices are ordered alphabetically by the label, rather than numerically by size of the slice.

The following is the same chart ordered in a more conventional way. The largest slice is placed along the top vertical, and the other slices are arranged in a clock-wise manner from larger to smaller.

This version is easier to read because the reader does not need to think about the order of the slices. The expectation of decreasing size is met.

The above pie chart, though, reveals breaking of another convention. The colors on this chart signify nothing! The general rule is color differences should encode data differences. Here, the colors should go from deepest to lightest. (One can even argue that different tinges is redundant.)

You see how this version is even better. In the previous version, the colors are distracting. You're wondering what they mean, and then you realize they signify nothing.

***

As designers of graphics, we follow a bunch of conventions silently. When a design deviates from it, it's harder to understand.

Recently, I wrote a long article for DataJournalism.com, setting out many of these unspoken conventions. Read it here.

 

The unspoken rules of visualization

My latest is at DataJournalism.com.

It's an essay on the following observation:

The efficiency and multidimensionality of the visual medium arise from a set of conventions and rules, which regularises the communications between producers of data visualisation and its consumers. These conventions and rules are often unspoken: it's the visual equivalent of saying ’it goes without saying’ .

There are lots of little things visualization designers do in their sleep that don't get mentioned. When a visual design deviates from these rules, the readers may get confused.

Here is one example I discussed in the article (hat tip to Xan Gregg).

This pie chart is not easy to read beyond the obvious point that English is the most popular. The following pie chart is much easier on the readers:

Why?

The designer follows some common conventions, such as placing the first slice at the top vertical, sorting the slices from largest to smallest (excepting the "other"), and introducing multiple colors only to encode data differences.

These rules are silently applied, and are not announced to the reader. There is a network effect: the more practitioners use these rules, the stronger they stick.

My essay attempts to outline some of the most important unspoken rules of visualizaiton. For more, see here.

Tightening the bond between the message and the visual: hello stats-cats

The editors of ASA's Amstat News certainly got my attention, in a recent article on school counselling. A research team asked two questions. The first was HOW ARE YOU FELINE?

Stats and cats. The pun got my attention and presumably also made others stop and wonder. The second question was HOW DO YOU REMEMBER FEELING while you were taking a college statistics course? Well, it's hard to imagine the average response to that question would be positive.

What also drew me to the article was this pair of charts:

Surely, ASA can do better. (I'm happy to volunteer my time!)

Rotate the chart, clean up the colors, remove the decimals, put the chart titles up top, etc.

***

The above remedies fall into the V corner of my Trifecta checkup.

The key to fixing this chart is to tighten the bond between the message and the visual. This means working that green link between the Q and V corners.

This much became clear after reading the article. The following paragraphs are central to the research (bolding is mine):

Responses indicated the majority of school counselors recalled experiences of studying statistics in college that they described with words associated with more unpleasant affect (i.e., alarm, anger, distress, fear, misery, gloom, depression, sadness, and tiredness; n = 93; 66%). By contrast, a majority of counselors reported same-day (i.e., current) emotions that appeared to be associated with more pleasant affect (i.e., pleasure, happiness, excitement, astonishment, sleepiness, satisfaction, and calm; n = 123; 88%).

Both recalled emotive experiences and current emotional states appeared approximately balanced on dimensions of arousal: recalled experiences associated with lower arousal (i.e., pleasure, misery, gloom, depression, sadness, tiredness, sleepiness, satisfaction, and calm, n = 65, 46%); recalled experiences associated with higher arousal (i.e., happiness, excitement, astonishment, alarm, anger, distress, fear, n = 70, 50%); current emotions associated with lower arousal (n = 60, 43%); current experiences associated with higher arousal (i.e., n = 79, 56%).

These paragraphs convey two crucial pieces of information: the structure of the analysis, and its insights.

The two survey questions measure two states of experiences, described as current versus recalled. Then the individual affects (of which there were 16 plus an option of "other") are scored on two dimensions, pleasure and arousal. Each affect maps to high or low pleasure, and separately to high or low arousal.

The research insight is that current experience was noticably higher than recalled experience on the pleasure dimension but both experiences were similar on the arousal dimension.

Any visualization of this research must bring out this insight.

***

Here is an attempt to illustrate those paragraphs:

The primary conclusion can be read from the four simple pie charts in the middle of the page. The color scheme shines light on which affects are coded as high or low for each dimension. For example, "distressed" is scored as showing low pleasure and high arousal.

A successful data visualization for this situation has to bring out the conclusion drawn at the aggregated level, while explaining the connection between individual affects and their aggregates.

Inspiration from a waterfall of pie charts: illustrating hierarchies

Reader Antonio R. forwarded a tweet about the following "waterfall of pie charts" to me:

Maarten Lamberts loved these charts (source: here).

I am immediately attracted to the visual thinking behind this chart. The data are presented in a hierarchy with three levels. The levels are nested in the sense that the pieces in each pie chart add up to 100%. From the first level to the second, the category of freshwater is sub-divided into three parts. From the second level to the third, the "others" subgroup under freshwater is sub-divided into five further categories.

The designer faces a twofold challenge: presenting the proportions at each level, and integrating the three levels into one graphic. The second challenge is harder to master.

The solution here is quite ingenious. A waterfall/waterdrop metaphor is used to link each layer to the one below. It visually conveys the hierarchical structure.

***

There remains a little problem. There is a confusion related to the part and the whole. The link between levels should be that one part of the upper level becomes the whole of the lower level. Because of the color scheme, it appears that the part above does not account for the entirety of the pie below. For example, water in lakes is plotted on both the second and third layers while water in soil suddenly enters the diagram at the third level even though it should be part of the "drop" from the second layer.

***

I started playing around with various related forms. I like the concept of linking the layers and want to retain it. Here is one graphic inspired by the waterfall pies from above:

 

Seeking simplicity in complex data: Bloomberg's dataviz on UK gender pay gap

Bloomberg featured a thought-provoking dataviz that illustrates the pay gap by gender in the U.K. The dataset underlying this effort is complex, and the designers did a good job simplifying the data for ease of comprehension.

U.K. companies are required to submit data on salaries and bonuses by gender, and by pay quartiles. The dataset is incomplete, since some companies are slow to report, and the analyst decided not to merge companies that changed names.

Companies are classified into industry groups. Readers who read Chapter 3 of Numbers Rule Your World (link) should ask whether these group differences are meaningful by themselves, without controlling for seniority, job titles, etc. The chapter features one method used by the educational testing industry to take a more nuanced analysis of group differences.

***

The Bloomberg visualization has two sections. In the top section, each company is represented by the percent difference between average female pay and average male pay. Then the companies within a given industry is shown in a histogram. The histograms provide a view of the disparity between companies within a given industry. The black line represents the relative proportion of companies in a given industry that have no gender pay gap but it’s the weight of the histogram on either side of the black line that carries the graphic’s message.

This is the histogram for arts, entertainment and recreation.

The spread within this industry is very wide, especially on the left side of the black line. A large proportion of these companies pay women less on average than men, and how much less is highly variable. There is one extreme positive value: Chelsea FC Foundation that pays the average female about 40% more than the average male.

This is the histogram for the public sector.

It is a much tighter distribution, meaning that the pay gaps vary less from organization to organization (this statement ignores the possibility that there are outliers not visible on this graphic). Again, the vast majority of entities in this sector pay women less than men on average.

***

The second part of the visualization look at the quartile data. The employees of each company are divided into four equal-sized groups, based on their wages. Think of these groups as the Top 25% Earners, the Second 25%, etc. Within each group, the analyst looks at the proportion of women. If gender is independent of pay, then we should expect the proportions of women to be about the same for all four quartiles. (This analysis considers gender to be the only explainer for pay gaps. This is a problem I've called xyopia, that frames a complex multivariate issue as a bivariate problem involving one outcome and one explanatory variable. Chapter 3 of Numbers Rule Your World (link) discusses how statisticians approach this issue.)

On the right is the chart for the public sector. This is a pie chart used as a container. Every pie has four equal-sized slices representing the four quartiles of pay.

The female proportion is encoded in both the size and color of the pie slices. The size encoding is more precise while the color encoding has only 4 levels so it provides a “binned” summary view of the same data.

For the public sector, the lighter-colored slice shows the top 25% earners, and its light color means the proportion of women in the top 25% earners group is between 30 and 50 percent. As we move clockwise around the pie, the slices represent the 2nd, 3rd and bottom 25% earners, and women form 50 to 70 percent of each of those three quartiles.

To read this chart properly, the reader must first do one calculation. Women represent about 60% of the top 25% earners in the public sector. Is that good or bad? This depends on the overall representation of women in the public sector. If the sector employs 75 percent women overall, then the 60 percent does not look good but if it employs 40 percent women, then the same value of 60% tells us that the female employees are disproportionately found in the top 25% earners.

That means the reader must compare each value in the pie chart against the overall proportion of women, which is learned from the average of the four quartiles.

***

In the chart below, I make this relative comparison explicit. The overall proportion of women in each industry is shown using an open dot. Then the graphic displays two bars, one for the Top 25% earners, and one for the Bottom 25% earners. The bars show the gap between those quartiles and the overall female proportion. For the top earners, the size of the red bars shows the degree of under-representation of women while for the bottom earners, the size of the gray bars shows the degree of over-representation of women.

The net sum of the bar lengths is a plausible measure of gender inequality.

The industries are sorted from the ones employing fewer women (at the top) to the ones employing the most women (at the bottom). An alternative is to sort by total bar lengths. In the original Bloomberg chart - the small multiples of pie charts, the industries are sorted by the proportion of women in the bottom 25% pay quartile, from smallest to largest.

In making this dataviz, I elected to ignore the middle 50%. This is not a problem since any quartile above the average must be compensated by a different quartile below the average.

***

The challenge of complex datasets is discovering simple ways to convey the underlying message. This usually requires quite a bit of upfront analytics, data transformation, and lots of sketching.