http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2062634/One-American-women-medication-mental-disorder.html
While surfing on internet, I came across a news article which claimed that more number of American women were taking medication to combat mental disorders. The article also included some statistics depicting the percentage of men, women, boys and girls taking medications in 2001 vs 2010. Later, it also quoted some famous personalities who fought some serious mental ailments.
I had the following thoughts while reading this article. (P.S This blog only talks about the first bar graph in the article – Percent of Population using Mental Health Medications)
- It would have been more engaging if the data was time-sequenced from 2001 to 2010. Seeing the change in the numbers from 2001 through 2010 gives me a deeper understanding of the situation.
- I really liked the way in which they segregated the data into four categories – men, women, girls and boys. But having said that, just by looking at the graph, I cannot interpret the age groups being considered to form those divisions. For e.g. what category would a female who is 23 years in age fall into? It would have made more sense to me, if the X axis also incorporated this information below each of those labels.
- The bars being labelled with numbers helps in understanding the percent increase/decrease in one glance. However, this makes the Y axis and the guidelines redundant. Besides, the colors being used are too dull to catch any attention. Using bright colors and a bigger font would help reach out to a larger audience. As we learnt in the class, putting in 3D effects don’t really help in conveying a message apart from making the graph look hodgepodge.
- The correct placement of the legend also has its role to play for the readers to quickly learn what the visualization is about. Thus, having the legend placed at the top right corner where there is sufficient space would have been appropriate.
- Lastly, incorporating some additional data perhaps the occupation, relationship status, would also help readers gauge the causes of increase in number of people and especially women, moving towards medication due to mental illness.
While it’s clear that the article focuses on a serious subject, the graphs included did not seem to be very intuitive and informative to me. Applying better visualization techniques would have been more effective in proving their point!