Tiger Woods – Data Visualization!
In the last Golf Magazine issue, there was an interesting graph that illustrated the results of an online poll. The title is, “Who Will End Tiger’s Reign as World Number One?” and is posted below as a thumbnail. In my humble opinion, I think the only one to end Tiger’s number one rank is [Tiger’s] retirement.
Here are a few comments on this graph:
The Good:
- Allure. The graph catches your eye and is visually appealing; probably much more than a simple bar chart or (cringe) pie chart. Kudos to Golf Magazine for not opting for the pie chart!
The Bad:
- Chartjunk (“The decoration of graphics generates a lot of ink that does not tell the viewer anything new,” Tufte) that does not add any true value. Some specifics are:
- Lines that are drawn from the name of the person to the slice of the graph.
- Fill within each of the slices is distracting and adds no value. Even if you were color blind, all of the fill styles are the same.
- 3-D is almost always a bad choice in data visualization and usually just skews the depiction and makes the data difficult to understand.
- Layout - I don’t understand why Phil Mickelson’s slice is slightly behind the Grim Reaper’s slice. It seems more logical to have it separated like the rest, so the spacing is even.
- Scale - It is nearly impossible to quantify the difference between Adam Scott and Jim Furyk without having the percentage labels. So, if you need the labels, then why not just display the data in a table (see below)? They probably didn’t because the table is much less attractive.
In this instance, I think most readers can get the same value, but it just may take a little longer. I have posted two different Excel versions of the same data that took no time to create. This is an interesting approach to displaying data and much better than a pie chart. I believe laying the data out horizontally is more effective because you can see the scale more efficiently. Click on the thumbnails to see a larger view.
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