The visualization being analyzed describes how Facebook’s IPO in 2012 compares with other tech IPO’s since the 1970’s. The IPO trends are presented as a series of five scatter plots by varying the y-axis alone. Though the visualization does a good job in explaining the comparison, I feel the entire analysis could have been demonstrated by a single visualization. My opinion is based on the following:
- There are three main colors used to represent the companies. The manner in which these colors are used, shows that the companies have been grouped based on a time range – orange ranging from 1970 to 1994, purple ranging from 1995 to 2002, and blue from 2003 to 2012. This color based grouping is redundant since there is an x-axis representing the time range. I feel the color mark should have been used to depict one of the measures being discussed, say for e.g. first day change or three-year change.
- The first two visualizations use a standard numeric scale to show differences in the company value, in current dollar terms. Since this difference varies greatly between companies and over such a wide range of years, the scale to be used should have been logarithmic. The reason behind this is, whenever we are trying to represent values which have a huge difference between min and max, using a logarithmic scale ensures a readable plot of the values, without distorting the actual percentage differences between them. The creator of the visualization has used logarithmic scale from the third chart onwards.
- The visualization plots company value data for more than 100 companies. Even with the logarithmic scale, it is very hard to know the companies and their data points. There is a search bar which helps in locating companies if you knew what to search for. Since the number of companies is large and not everyone looking at this visualization may know of companies since the early 1970’s, I feel the creator should have added a sorted list of all companies in a separate group box to the side of the main visualization. The reader could then just scroll through the list and look at the various companies for which data was plotted.
- The fourth and fifth visualization shows the trend as per the other two measures i.e. first day change and three-year change. The trend of average stock rise and negative returns which the creator is describing is depicted using change in size of each bubble. I feel this was not required because these measures were also present in the first three visualizations as well using a tooltip.
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