DSA Insights

Instead of calling them pie charts, we’ll just call them donut (doughnut) charts and make them magically delicious.  Wrong.  These two charts, which appeared in the July 14th issue of BusinessWeek, are some of the worst charts I’ve seen in a while.  Note: in the print version, the legend doesn’t cover up the actual chart.  I’m not sure why this wasn’t fixed in the online graphic. 

There have been many articles and blog posts written on the ineffectiveness of pie charts, so I won’t belabor the point more.  For more information about why pie charts (donut charts with the center filled in) are not a good data visualization option, see the links below.  There’s no point in saying the same thing in a different way.  The timing of this post is good being that Seth Godin recently created a lot of stir about bar charts, which led to more pie chart discussions.

Related books:

Creating More Effective Graphs by Naomi B. Robbins

Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten by Stephen Few

Related links on discussion of Bar and Pie charts:

DSA Insights

Jon Peltier

Peltier Technical Services

Jorge Camoes - Charts

Juice Analytics Original

Juice Analytics

Stephen Few

Edward Tufte

Junk Charts

Note: the first pie chart is credited to William Playfair roughly 200 years ago.

The graphic above is a pretty good example of an effective dashboard in my humble opinion.  It doesn’t use a lot of space, yet shows an abundance of data to compare the companies.  Also, notice the sector segmentation using color and columns.  Great job BusinessWeek!

Can you tell me what’s missing with the graphic above?  It has to be the analyst in me, but the first thing I noticed is what’s wasn’t there in this graphic.  Click here to get the answer!

Here is the key to the boxes above. 

This graphic above is another great example of a dashboard type display showing sales and R&D.  I would have thought that Apple spends more on R&D as a percentage of sales than just 3.3%.

Source: www.businessweek.com

Below is a line graph showing how the top companies performed compared to the S&P Global and S&P 500 index.  I prefer no legends and adding the description to each line.

I just can’t seem to help myself when it comes to sharing beauties like the pie chart below with my readers.  The pie chart was found here.  Yes, it’s colorful.  Yes, it’s an example of pimping your chart.  And finally, yes, it’s extremely ineffective.  Just recreating this chart accurately was nearly impossible because of the small slices that are not even visible.

It takes entirely too long to go from legend to chart, legend to chart, legend to chart, (you get the point) to cross reference the two.  A simple bar/column chart would have been a much better choice.

Here is my version that took me longer to figure out which values referenced which slice percentages than creating the actual chart.

Suggested Reading:

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition

Visualizing Data

Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten

Creating More Effective Graphs

Here are two charts that débuted in the June 9th issue of BusinessWeek and reminded me of a recent newsletter from Stephen Few found here.  I have noticed that they [BusinessWeek} tend to use colors that jump out at you for that WOW factor.  I may not have picked this color, but when you see all of the graphics with the same color scheme on one page, it definitely works.

Here is the Excel color palette, which contains the lime green color.   In the chart on top, the graphic designer used the top color (black) and the middle color (lime green) found below to differentiate between 2004 and 2008.  In the map image, just lime green was used to highlight some states regarding the average cost per day for a private room in a nursing home.

As I learned from Stephen Few's newsletter, an excellent expert resource regarding color [besides Stephen's article} is Cindy Brewer's website found here.

Here are a few examples regarding the use of color in a column chart.  In my opinion, the first example below is one of the biggest abuses of color in chart design.

Novice:

Often, I see colors used in charts with the sole purpose to be colorful.  A perfect example would be the rainbow column chart (below), where a different color is used for each column.

Better:

A better option for the column chart would be to use more effective colors that are all the same.

Expert:

An expert may use the same color except for the column that they are pointing out.  By using this technique, the reader's attention is immediately drawn to the value for June (black).

Best:

A line graph would be a better option for showing the Widget sales over time.  Whenever time is on the x-axis, a line graph is probably a better option unless you're trying to illustrate a certain point.  If you want to highlight a certain time period, the use of text boxes [with high transparency] can be handy.

Do you think they mean the same thing?  I often find these two terms used interchangeably when I think they refer to different things.  Check out the discussion thread in our Facebook discussion group!

Support Analytics - Facebook Group Discussion

Announcement:
It’s time for DSA Insights to announce an opportunity to win a prize in a way that should be fun, exciting and valuable to our readers. There are two prizes to be claimed, which are:

1st Prize (choice of one):

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte
• Show Me the Numbers, Stephen Few
• Million Dollar Consulting (TM) Toolkit, Alan Weiss, Ph D.
• Amazon $25 gift card

2nd Prize:

• Amazon $20 gift card

Theme:
Your task is to write a new post in your blog that is themed, “The most important thing I know about__(Enter a topic below)__, is ___.”
Available topics that follow the theme of DSA Insights are:

• Analytics
• Business Intelligence
• Consulting
• Data Visualization
• Info Visualization
• Excel
• Blogging (new 5/2)

Instructions:
Note: old posts written before today will not be accepted.

1. Write - Write a post using the theme and filling in the blanks:
   1. If you don’t have a blog, I will consider submissions for guest posts to this blog and, if chosen, it will qualify for one of the prizes listed. DSA Insights reserves the right to include/exclude posts submitted via this method at our discretion.
   2. Maximum of 3 entries allowed per person - this is per person and not per blog. If submitting more than one blog post, it has to be on a different topic.
   3. Maximum of 5 referrals will count towards the prizes.
   4. Please keep it clean and family friendly.
   5. It can be funny, serious, an essay, video, podcast, list, tip, trick, picture, etc.
   6. Give your post a good title as it will be the only text listed in this blog as a submission.
   7. Please consider a link-back to this post in your post so that your readers can participate or know that you are participating.
2. Submit - Once you have written and posted the new entry to your blog follow these instructions to participate. Submit your post to me by sending me an email using my contact form found here. Include:
   1. Name (as you want it to appear in my blog)
   2. Email address (must be valid)
   3. Message subject: DSA Post Project
   4. Title of your blog post
   5. URL of your post
   6. Referral - optional (who told you about this post)
3. Spread the word - Tell others about this post and if they participate you will receive 1 entry for each referral up to a maximum of 5.
4. Check back - All valid submissions will be included in a cumulative list in a separate post.
5. Have fun! Surf the submissions, inter-link between participating bloggers, post your favorite or top 5 submissions, and tell everyone you know about this opportunity! If you take full advantage of this opportunity, you will have up to 8 chances to win a prize.

Timeline:
Begins:
Thursday, May 1 (today)

Ends:
Friday, May 16 - end of day your time zone.

Winners Announced:
Monday 19 May - I will announce the two winners in a featured blog post. All entries (up to eight) will be listed and two different people will be selected at random.

Winners will be contacted and will need to provide a valid U.S. mailing address if a book is selected as the prize. International winners will default to an Amazon gift card delivered via e-mail.

A special thank you goes to Lou Spirito, Graphics Director at the Baltimore Sun for providing the graphs below and some valuable insight.

Recently, I wrote a blog post about the homicide rate in Baltimore and included the second graph below, which can be found here.

Lou was gracious enough to share with me that the original graph that was designed for the article was the second one below, which is a bar chart overlaid with two series. Then, the chart was redesigned to be the line chart shown below. Prior to the release, it was then reverted back to the originally designed bar chart. I have said before that I prefer line charts to stacked bar charts, but this may be an exception. Here is a quote from Lou that explains part of the design choice.

“I agree with your observation that in this particular case the bars are superior to the line chart for the simple reason that the relationship of the “annual” and “first quarter” data remains unified — this relationship gets lost to some degree in the line chart.” [Lou Spirito]

Because the two series have a significant scale variance, it is helpful to use the bar chart where you can add the values to the smaller series that has less variance between the years than the second series. Adding values to the line chart would make it unreadable.

Granted, both would work well and serve the purpose, but I really like the bar chart with the two overlaid series. Also, the use of color is clean, neat and effective without being gaudy. I may have changed the labels on the x-axis to be every five or ten years, but otherwise it is well designed.

Content is king and sometimes that means going unconventional. See Lou’s comment below.

“We take great care to design graphics with content driving the way. Sometimes it means breaking standard convention at the risk of fielding criticism…” [Lou Spirito]

Intermediate design before reverting back to the original:

Original and Final Design:

Which one do you think is more effective and why?

During the months of April and May 2008, BonaVista Systems is running an Excel Dashboard competition. I have said before that their MicroCharts product is exceptional for dashboard design and improving presentations or Excel analytics. The new version (3) has a lot of great new features, which can be found here.

MicroCharts is the first software, to my knowledge, that has a solution for creating Sparklines in Excel without having to finagle using the old camera feature. MicroCharts is easy to use and truly a great product. For under $200, you can get this add-on for Excel. You can download MicroCharts and try it for free for 30 days.

For the last few days, I have seen many of the blogs that I read promote this competition. I have been hesitant to follow suit because of redundancy, but also believe that it would be a shame for my readers to miss out on this event.

Winners of the competition will receive:

• 1st Place - iPhone
• 2nd Place - A Stephen Few data visualization workshop
• 3rd Place - Stephen Few’s book - Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data

Some other exceptional blog/web sites that you should check out are:

• Stephen Few’s - Perceptual Edge
• Nathan Yau’s - FlowingData
• Jorge Camoes’ - Charts
• Jon Peltier’s - PTS Blog
• Andrea Coutu’s - Consultant Journal
• Andrew Vande Moere’s - Infosthetics

The bar chart below made the cover of the Baltimore Sun newspaper on April 7, 2008. It definitely caught my eye because of its design and my passion for data/info visualization. In the past, I have been a bit unkind to stacked bar charts, as a quick glance through the previous blog posts could quickly confirm. My first impression was that this was going to be another example of what not to do using stacked bar charts.

After taking a closer look, this turns out to be a good example of visualizing data. Sure, it’s no line graph, but this chart is very effective for one fundamental reason. Both series, Annual Homicide Total and First Quarter numbers, have the same baseline - zero. By having both series start at zero, the chart is turned into a simple bar chart with two overlaid series versus a stacked bar chart.

The values for the first quarter numbers are labeled probably because they would be hard to determine due to the scale being high to accommodate for both series. My guess would be that this chart was embellished with a graphic program like, Adobe Illustrator. However, the same results could be done in Excel with a little finagling. The callout boxes are strategically placed to point out the significant figures like lowest, highest, starting and prior year.

Source: Baltimore Sun & Baltimore Police Dept.

The Google map below accompanied the bar chart from above on the Baltimore Sun’s website. Having a vested interest in the Baltimore area, I quickly looked to see where the most homicides were and if there seemed to be a pattern. I love the interactivity of Google maps driven by a set of data!

Source: Data compiled by Sun reporter Gus Sentementes using information from the City of Baltimore. Baltimoresun.com designer Stephen Mekosh produced the Google Map mashup.

For my fellow The Wire (HBO Series) enthusiasts, you can see if the West side has more homicides than the East side thanks to the Marlow and Barksdale crews. I’m sure that Pryzbylewski (a.k.a. “Prez”) and Detective Freamon would love to see these stats pinned to their board.

Prior to Support Analytics’ move to Maryland last summer, we were located in Richmond, Virginia. Everyone in Richmond and probably the country knows the credit card company Capital One (a.k.a. Cap One), but may not know that their headquarters is located in McLean, Virginia. They also have a large facility in Richmond. For the purpose of this post, I am only focusing on their credit card business.

If you have read Tom Davenport’s book, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning and Ian Ayres’ book Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart, you would get the sense that Capital One is an analytics superpower. Or, to use Ian’s term, he would say they are a “super cruncher”. Now, all things considered, Capital One has a enormous amount of data that they need to understand, analyze and create algorithms from to efficiently and effectively run their business. No easy task.

Here’s my question. If they are such an analytics superpower, why do I get business credit card applications when I already own one of their business credit cards? This hasn’t happened once by accident. I get one about every two weeks. If they can’t differentiate between who is a current customer versus who is a prospective customer, then I can’t continue to consider them in the elite sector of analytics. Sorry.

Think of the dollars wasted through this process. Not only is there the postage fee, but there is also the working cost to: store data, print the applications and ship them out. I won’t even get into the whole notion of saving trees or the annoyance factor.