The above visualization depicts the food eating habits across the US states. The article suggests the higher consumption of fruits/vegetables, the lower the obesity rate.
What I like about this visualization?
The first visualization shows the fruit/vegetable consumption and the second visualization shows obesity rate across the US states. Both visualizations show what it says but it would have been better if there would have been one visualization that depicts relation between fruit/vegetable and obesity rate. Also, each graph has color and show color variation as per range.
What I didn’t like about this visualization:
1. It’s difficult to understand the relation between fruits/vegetables with obesity. One needs to look at both visualizations and then try to decipher the relation. Visualization should be easy to understand and interpret the correlation between food consumption and obesity.
2. The article has taken only one factor into consideration to decide the obesity rate. It fails to take other factors into consideration such as lifestyle, physical activity, social and economic factors. it should have collected more data to decide the which factor could lead to increase or decrease in obesity rate in different states of US.
3. One could interpret the visualization that Colorado is skinny state and as well as less meat consumption state, which is totally wrong.
Audience:
This article is written for rural American to show the trend of food consumption and its relation to obesity
Does it has good visualization properties:
1. Truthful: Yes, it is. Though it’s combination of two visualization to show relation between fruit/vegetable consumption to obesity rate, but, each visualization is truthful in what it says.
2. Functional: Yes, each visualization is functional and conveys the individual information.
3. Beautiful: It’s partially beautiful, it’s just the map graph with color variation but not that appealing to the eyes.
4. Insightful: This both visualization doesn’t give any insights. The visualization fails to show any trend.
5. Enlightening: It fails to enlighten from the audience perspective. It’s show the consumption of food and obesity rate but no enlighten about what action could be taken to reduce the obesity rate.
How this graph could have been better:
1. Instead of two visualization to show relation between fruit/vegetable consumption to obesity rate, one could have used Dual axis concept and depicted the relation in graph.
2. Use of Bar graph. One could use bar graph to depict food consumption across states and line graph to show the trend of obesity rate of each state.
3. Also, collecting data and depicting other factors that could relate to obesity rate would have been more insightful. Adding other factors would be very helpful to decide that only consuming fruits/vegetable could lower obesity rate or not.
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