We all stress about money, so why don’t we talk about it? Three out of four Americans regularly stress out about money. That means that at any given time, the majority of us might be spinning in our heads with worry, shame, and anxiety about the very same thing—but none of us is talking about it.
In technology companies, the salaries are sky-high. Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Uber have set a trend in offering their people, on average, six -figure paychecks.
Let us focus in detail on the pay composition of the key roles in the tech giant Google.
What do I like about the pie-chart?
- Labelling: The labels are explicitly mentioned and this takes very little effort from the reader to match the slices of the pie to the text.
- Colour coding: The Visual property seems to be very appealing and effective, a “color-blinded” reader can also interpret the information from the pie and colours alone do not have a meaning of their own on the pie chart.
What do I not like about the pie-chart?
- Complexity: Pie-charts are poor at communicating data, they take up more space and are often difficult to read. Research suggests that it gets very difficult to the reader to compare the size of the angles when there is no scale present, interpreting the accurate data is complex in the above figure, with too many arrows pointing in different directions, this seems to be a herculean task.
- Not-a-proportion of the whole: Pie charts are usually used when different slices of the pie combine to form a whole. In the above chart, the slices represent salaries of disparate positions at Google and the sum of the parts essentially do not add any value.
- Overlapping slices: The overlapping slices confuse the reader, it takes some effort from the reader’s end to understand the slices of the pie and the underlying pies data is not easily decipherable. For example, the salaries of the staff user experience designer, Engineering Director cannot be understood without effort. The underlying slices data is fuzzy.
- Too much Information overload: Research suggests to never have any more than 7 categories in the pie-chart as it becomes harder for the eye to distinguish relativity of size between each section. In the above pie-chart, the author has used around 10 slices and this make the chart cluttered and hard to distinguish, because of multiple categories, it becomes hard for the reader to identify the proportions correctly, compare different categories and gain any insight from the picture.
- Less effective: One of the objectives of a visualisation is to present information in a way that can be quickly read and easily understood. If you glance at the above chart too quickly, the chart does not deliver the information in the most effective manner.
- Missing Timeline: The chart does not appear to have a timeline. Absolute time adds a lot of meaningful information to visualised data and the reader is deprived of this information.
How did I Re-design this?
1. A range of values: The salaries are a range of values and hence box plot would be an ideal visualisation, the box plot gives us the Highest salary in the group, the lowest and the median. So, the reader can have a comprehensive view of what each position in the company has to offer.
2. Comparison of data: By using a box plot the comparison of salaries among the positions is easier than that of pie-charts which had angular views for the salaries.
3. More effective: The reader can get the gist of the visualisation with ease and can quickly identify the salaries corresponding to the positions which makes this an effective visualisation.
https://public.tableau.com/profile/publish/google_salaries/Sheet1#!/publish-confirm
References:
https://www.quora.com/How-and-why-are-pie-charts-considered-evil-by-data-visualization-experts
http://www.insightsquared.com/2014/02/why-pie-charts-are-the-worst/