https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/035/
Analysis
The Description
This graph explores variations in high school education attainment within selected race and Hispanic origin groups by gender and nativity between regions within US.
Purpose of the visualization
Compare and Contrast: Attainment of a high school diploma (or equivalent level of education) is generally very high in the U.S., so this graph focuses on the percentage of the population 25 and older who do not have a high school education.
What’s good?
- Clear and concise heading and legends, and no unnecessary embellishments.
What’s Not-so-good?
Aesthetics:
- There is no consistent color palette that has been used.
- The visualization is static and shows a lot of information but does not highlight any insight or actionable information. Basic Annotations and highlights can help hit the message home.
- A lot of white space
Information:
- There are a bunch of additional points that aren’t readily view-able in the data but become visible once the data is presented in a more detail oriented format. For example, there are notable differences between foreign-born and native population among many groups, in the West, and 57 percent of Hispanic foreign-born males had less than a high school education compared with 19 percent of Hispanic native-born males. Nineteen percent of Asian foreign-born females had less than a high school diploma compared with 5 percent of Asian native-born females. However this is not easily understood from the visual. In short, this visualization could use a fair amount of details so that the intended purpose of the data can be achieved.
- A lot of information is spread out which doesn’t allow for easy comparing and contrasting between different classifications.
A better Version:
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d27/nsrivastava/Blog4_zpsqo6uvgfr.png
Cleaning up the data to create new category that identify gender and nativity helps combining the charts into a single graph which helps in presenting a consolidated view of the data.
Using Filters a lot more insights can be gained which are not possible from the original visual. A few such insights are:
- Foreign Born females and Males from the west region has the highest percentage of people without High School Education.
- Among Native Born, North East lags behind with the highest percentage of population without High School Education.
- Overall, there is difference in avg percentage of people without high school education between Native and Foreign Born
What can be improved further?
Spatial Context
Depending on the information that is to be conveyed, it makes sense to display a map for visualization depicting geographical information. Visual cues are always easy to read and understand. Since the data is for US regions, showing this information on a US map divided into 4 regions helps the audience connect and identify with the information.
Icons, shapes, and symbols
A picture tells a thousand words. The use of icons, shapes, and/or symbols can improve visualization’s readability and also helps in capturing the attention of the audience. There’s a thin line between graphics that enhance a data visualization and junk, but when done tastefully, graphics have the ability to provide much more information than words alone.
Symbols, icons not only make the visualization more engaging, but they also provide the advantage of reducing, and often eliminating, language barriers. In the above visualization, using the universal symbol for male and female can help even those with language issues to identify and compare the percentages for male and female.
Conclusion
It should be carefully considered as to what is the best type of visualization for the piece of information or data set that needs to be presented. While ease of understanding should always be a consideration, ensuring that the visual conveys all the relevant information and provides the gist of what the underlying data is trying to showcase is also extremely important.
References:
https://extension.org/2017/04/11/7-elements-of-good-data-visualization/