The Healthy Years of Life [Chart Review]
[via Economist]
I have a few questions for the new and loyal readers of the Support Analytics blog:
- What is the first thing that your attention is drawn to when looking at this image (I have difficulty calling this a chart)?
- Does your answer from the first question take up about a third of the real estate in the image?
- Does it have anything to do with Data?
- Who the heck runs through a field of flowers, barefoot, in WHITE linen pants and no shirt? [rhetorical - I don't want to know]
The Economist is famous for adding backgrounds and images to their data visualizations. Every time I see charts like this, I seriously cringe and make that breathing in through your teeth sound. By adding this image, they are taking away from the real story – the data visualization. I would like to see the same bar chart without the image and background noise, because I think the chart is interesting and has a good story to tell.
Other Improvements:
- Remove the shadow effect from the bars and legend
- Remove the transparency from the bars
Wow, look at Germany where about half of a man’s life span over 50 is going to be considered unhealthy. Compare Germany to Denmark where men are living with a much better quality of life after fifty. I would like to analyze the data behind the chart and also understand how they determined healthy versus unhealthy.
Serious question – Am I alone? Do images like this grab your attention more than one with just a bar chart? I see this so much that I am starting to wonder if main street folks prefer this over a simple and clean bar chart. Let me know your thoughts and please be honest.
Most Commented Posts
November 24th, 2008 at 8:50 am
The image only really appears to be over the top when you look at this as a completely isolated chart. But this probably takes up 1/8 of a page or less in print, and needs to draw the readers’ attention. So if they first look at the guy running, that’s not a bad thing. They can then look at the chart next to the image.
Yellow on blue is also a good contrast, the chart is pretty easy to read despite the busy background. And that also includes the shadows, which help separate the chart from the background; I would not want to remove those. They also cite their source properly, so answering your question about the data and about how to determine good and bad health is only a few mouse clicks (and perhaps an article fee) away.
I see your point in principle, but in a publication aimed at the general public, you have to get people to pay attention first, and you’re not going to do that with a boring old bar chart. In a presentation, with a captive audience, you can do that – but not in a magazine. And the data presentation here is otherwise pretty much flawless.
[Reply]
November 24th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Tony -
My attention was instantly drawn to the Willie Nelson wannabe running in front of the chart. When I finally dragged my attention away from him, I looked at the bar chart: Hmm, Denmark, 73 years life expectancy, Malta 71, Italy 70.
I glanced down to Estonia, and thought, wow, 35 years life expectancy, that sucks. Then, wait a minute, oh, the bars don’t start at zero, they start between 45 and 50. While I examined the scale, I finally noticed the legend.
Then after a moment, I noticed the light brown bars, which I actually hadn’t noticed before. So the title ‘Life Expectancy’ wasn’t totally accurate, since the more brightly highlighted bars were only part of life expectancy.
I guess you need to show something interesting to get people’s attention, but there were not enough clues in the chart to help me interpret the data readily. If the runner had been there, but without the flowers and sky, I’m sure I would have noticed the bad scale and the badly formatted second series that much sooner.
Robert -
If a chart with any colors, including simple white, gray, and black, doesn’t draw the user’s attention away from the text, then either your writers are better than Hemingway, or the readers need new glasses.
Yellow on shaded blue was okay, but the tan has the same intensity as the blue, so I lost it (and I’m not even among the 10% of the male population who suffer from colorblindness).
[Reply]
November 24th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
@ Robert
You make some good points, especially regarding the difference between the captive audience and the periodical reader. I disagree about the shadows being OK. If you look at the end of the tan bar, it actually looks longer because of the shadow behind the bar. I can live with the shadow in the legend.
@ Jon
It sounds like your experience was similar to mine. It took me a little while to fully study the chart to understand what was going on. Yes, the bars don’t start at zero, but didn’t you notice the ribbon-like end on the left side of the bar? I guess the point may be to have a well designed chart/graph before throwing in images of Willie. I also agree that the tan bar blends in too much and could have been a different color with more contrast.
Thank you both for your feedback!
Question – would *you* ever use an image in your charts?
[Reply]
November 25th, 2008 at 12:05 am
The image made me look at the headline. The headline made me look at the guy and then I looked at the chart. If it had just been a chart, I probably wouldn’t have looked at it. The image made me think of this vintage Canadian ad for “ParticipAction”, our national fitness program: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMD35tUh-Ek
[Reply]
November 25th, 2008 at 6:57 am
Tony -
I didn’t realize that the ragged left hand edge of the bars indicated the axis didn’t start at zero until I already knew that the axis didn’t start at zero. I think I was simply ignoring it as meaningless decoration. More effective would have been a gap near the base of the bars.
I may associate a image with a chart, by sticking it nearby, but integrating a picture into a chart is asking for trouble. Some of the charts in The Economist are very good, but then they spoil it with ones like this. I guess the opposite extreme is USA Today, which sometimes integrates chart with their pictures.
[Reply]
November 28th, 2008 at 8:42 am
[...] Rose treats us to a bar chart of European male life expectancy in The Healthy Years of Life [Chart Review]. The chart is from The Economist, but it’s more like the puzzle in back of People magazine: [...]