Nowadays people are working on n-dimensions for a better understanding of data and to get accurate insights. However, an infographic with more than 2-dimensional representation will misguide a user and even creates difficulty to understand.
Let’s walk through a classic example of this scenario, image 1.0 is a column chart but in 3-dimensional representation. It tries to depict sales of widgets monthly, there are 16 widgets that are being sold for 11 months of a year. At first glance, the chart looks really cool with column coming to life and appealing.
Problems: Aesthetic scenes, Distortion, Accessibility.
Let’s take a step back and understand few things before we go ahead, who are the targetted audience and what do they need? I guess that’s for Sales managers who would be the targetted audience for this kind of report. The information they look for is sales for each product, in this case, a widget for a time period (Weekly, monthly or yearly). This list can extend to the region, geo this list goes on.. and is totally dependent on the kind of business a company own. In this case, all the information is being depicted correctly in this chart but by using a wrong viz.
From a viz developer point of view, aesthetic sense plays a major role in increasing usage. This claim can go wrong if we use a 3D chart which is beautiful and appealing to one’s eyes. As this chart doesn’t help to understand data for the months from April to November as they all overlap on each other. Secondly, there are too many legend colors which create lots of confusion to the reader. In addition to this, we can see that color changes when there is an overlap of bars.
Coming to the metrics that are depicted, they do not reflect any figure of sales i.e. in millions or thousands, as a sales manager one would be really interested in those figures.
Accessibility plays a major role in navigating or drilling through the reports, which is missing in this report. Image 2.0 is a sample sales report which shows how line graph can better interpret sales figures than column chart. Secondly, when you hover on the line we can see the actual sales numbers which give an exact idea of how the team is performing and are the targets met.
Segmentation of products into multiple categories is very important to compare. In image 1.0 we can see that there are more than 15 widgets, they are high in number to compare.
Finally, a person working on viz should first understand who are the audience, what data are they looking for and at what granularity. Interpreting in 3D viz looks and sounds cool but it doesn’t serve the purpose.