Data visualization allows us all to see and understand our data more deeply. That understanding breeds good decisions. It can be a great way to drive numbers home and give them a visual weight mere statistics don’t have. At least, that’s what happens when they make sense. However, sometimes visualizations may look good but are simply unnecessary and miss the point completely. To take an example, we have the following visualization from the Washington post article, showing 100 years of hurricanes hitting and missing Florida.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/one-hundred-years-of-hurricanes/
The above visual aims to depict every single hurricane over a period of 100 years that had hit or missed Florida. Each line in the above visual represents a hurricane. However, it is unclear as what is it that the visual is trying to achieve as it doesn’t show the number of storms that missed of hit Florida over the past 100 years. Let’s analyze the given visual on two main visualization criteria that it completely fails on:
CLAIM: All visualizations must answer a question, make a claim or provide some insight that wasn’t available or accessible without the visual representation. The article using the above visualization claims that Florida is the landmass of choice for storms. However the visual doesn’t provide any support for the claim. It doesn’t tell the number of storms that have hit or missed Florida and nor any correlation with time or location.
VISUAL AESTHETICS: From a customary look it simply looks like a child was let loose with a pen in his hand and was told to have a go at it. “Florida” which is the center of the discussion is not even visible with the white base and white lines demarcating Florida and its neighbors. The lines depicting the path each hurricane followed are all overlapped and do not provide any helpful information to predict the path of any future hurricanes. The darkened line depicts the latest
A Better Depiction… “Tracking the Paths”
http://pparker.org/hurricanes/hurricane_history.htm
The above visualization depicting similar information regarding storms that have hit Florida over a period of time and the path they followed, despite being visually unappealing is still much better than the previous one as it provides useful information that can be acted upon to make certain decisions. The above visual clearly represents the year of the storm (category 3 and above) and the path it took. The highlighted region in the center of the map depicts the counties most affected by the storms and thus provides useful information. For example, while developing evacuation plans the counties highlighted can be prioritized.
In conclusion, while it is important for the visualization to be appealing with pretty colors, fancy charts, and cool pictures in order to capture the interest of its audience, but if the visualization doesn’t give quick insights that aid decision making, it’s not really very effective and defeats its very purpose.