Author: ayeshaajm

Dashboard – Who’s on the Magic Mountain?

This dashboard published on The Economist gives an overview of the attendance demographics for the World Economic Forum ’13-’14 held at Davos, Switzerland.

First some background on the World Economic Forum :

• Swiss nonprofit foundation based in Geneva
• Annual meeting held in the end of January every year
• Annual meeting brings together leaders in business and politics, journalists and economists for four days to discuss pressing world issues.
• Motto – “Committed to improving the state of the world”.

The Dashboard :

The intent of this dashboard is to convey some key numbers about the attendance at the forum like – male vs female delegates, % of representation of different countries and number of delegates in distinct sectors.

Subjective Dimensions:

– Truthful? Partially. 

It is partially truthful. It does represent direct numbers and figures truthfully. I say it is

partially truthful because of lack of key contextual information on one of the charts that the article uses to make a claim at the end. I’ll elaborate more on this later.

– Functional? Adequately.

It conveys information on who is on the titular ‘Magi Mountain’ i.e., at the World Economic Forum.

– Beautiful? Adequately.

This chart and the article were published on The Economist whose readership includes highly educated people many of whom are influential executives and policy-makers. The colors chosen are safe and do not overwhelm the audience.

– Insightful? No.

There is not much insight to regained from this dashboard. Many of the values presented are direct figures and not much analysis has been done on them.

– Enlightening? Not really.

Unless the enlightenment sought to be gained by the audience was that their future financial success depended on become a member of the Forum.

Lets delve deeper into two aspects of the dashboard :

Color Palette – Overall & Highlights :

I like the overall color palette the dashboard has employed in the different charts. The colors neither overwhelm each other nor the reader. That being said the key takeaways from each chart could have been highlighted more effectively if some other color palette was chosen. The author has used a predominantly blue palette with different shades ranging from indigo to cornflower blue which is difficult to interpret in terms of the differences between them when viewing the charts.

Claims: The article states some ‘key takeaways’ like –

“Of the 2,622 hobnobbers invited to this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, just 15% are women.”

“The total worth of the 15 richest is around $285 billion.”

“The stock-market value of firms represented is $12 trillion, about one-fifth of the world’s total. And after all the inflated expenses and egos, what has been the fate of the companies that sent delegates at least three times in the past five years? Those 104 firms underperformed both the S&P 500 and MSCI World Index. Time to get back to work.”

I mentioned ‘key takeaway’ in quotes because the third statement is the key focus of the article. And the only way the viewer could possibly gain some information on the claim or to back the claim, from the chart, is to look at spaghetti chart at the lower left corner. The chart does not provide any further information to back such a bold claim that those companies needed to work harder, or as said in the article ‘get back to work’.

Doing some research about the general profile of the companies that attend the forum, I was able to find that most of them are long standing and stable organizations.

This is further evidenced by the fact that the World Economic Forum is invite only and requires a very expensive membership — As of 2011, an annual membership costs $52,000 for an individual member, $263,000 for “Industry Partner” and $527,000 for “Strategic Partner”. An admission fee costs $19,000 per person.^[17] In 2014, WEF raised annual fees by 20 percent, making the cost for “Strategic Partner” from SFr500,000 ($523,000) to SFr600,000 ($628,000) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Economic_Forum#Membership

Measuring these organizations’ performance year over year does not make sense because they go back far too long to be able to outperform themselves and instead they present a stable upward trend in performance that is too little to present as much of a performance improvement.

Redesign Examples (for different years, namely 2015 and 2016) : I was able to find a better set of visualizations that visualized the attendance demographic of the World Economic Forum here & here. In both the visualizations, there are no dubious charts and the differences, be it in age/gender/number of delegates by role, are presented clearly to the user.

References :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Economic_Forum#Membership

http://www.economist.com/news/international/21595032-whos-magic-mountain

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35285852

https://www.msci.com/documents/10199/fa5cdafc-d8a3-4c2f-94dc-268723a685fd

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/davos-2016-how-much-does-it-cost-attend-46th-world-economic-forum-1538520

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/21/-sp-davos-guide-world-economic-forum

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/01/daily-chart-15

The claim made by this article is that the daily newspaper circulation is falling in the West (in countries like USA, Europe etc) and rising in the East (in countries like India, China etc).

A few statements from the article – “Since 2008 circulation in America has fallen by 15% to 41M while advertising revenue has plummeted by 42%, accounting for three-quarters of the global decline in advertising revenue in the same period.”

“Looking further east, though, things look brighter. Circulation in Asia has risen by 10%, offsetting much of the decline elsewhere. With 114.5M daily newspapers, China has surpassed India to become the world’s biggest newspaper market.”

Audience – This chart and the article were published on The Economist whose readership includes highly educated people many of whom are influential executives and policy-makers.

Measures –

1. Percent change in newspaper circulation
2. Daily newspaper circulation per 1,000 population

Lets break down the visual –

Color – The chart uses stacks of newspapers to denote the percentage change. Usually unnecessary beautifiers (like 3D cues) do little if not nothing to convey the message and this chart is no different. The only save in this case is the choice of colors for the negative and positive changes in percentage.

Chart Icons – The author has taken care to keep the number of papers on the stacks reasonably proportionate to the percentage change they represent. Numbers are rounded either up or down, so a 5.3% change becomes 5 newspapers and a 0.5% change becomes one newspaper on the stack.

Layout – The structure and layout is simple and clean. The negative and positive directions (of change) are clear and immediately apparent to the viewer.

Unfortunately the most important part of the chart, the numbers, are way off and the chart is found to be misleading upon close examination.

Problems –  At first glance, it seems as though the numbers in the grey boxes (Daily news paper circulation per 1000 population) are denoted by the height of the corresponding newspapers stack. But the heights are related to the colored numbers directly on the stacks. This is confusing and the author could have left out the grey numbers since they don’t contribute to the message of the visualization.

Lets look at the second claim stated above – “Looking further east, though, things look brighter. Circulation in Asia has risen by 10%, offsetting much of the decline elsewhere. With 114.5M daily newspapers, China has surpassed India to become the world’s biggest newspaper market.”

The measures in the chart;

China – 106 daily newspaper circulation per 1000 population
33.2% increase

India – 139 daily newspaper circulation per 1000 population
7.8% increase

This information, without actual population numbers of those countries, is not reliable. Lets look at the numbers and see the actual results for four countries on the positive side of the scale on the chart.

	2012 Population	Newspaper circ./day/1000	Percent change	Newspapers in circulation/day
China	1350700000	106	33.2	143174200
India	1263600000	139	7.8	175640400
Lux.	530,946	711	19.8	377502.606
HK	715460	609	5.3	435715.14

Lets compare China vs India and Hong Kong vs Luxembourg.

China vs India

Luxemborg vs Hong Kong

The charts above show that the article had made a wrong claim that China had overtaken India in the newspaper market. In addition, Hong Kong with a less percent change and less newspaper circulation/day/1000 actually has more newspapers in circulation than Luxembourg in contrary to what the article and chart depict.

Reading through the comments for this article I was intrigued to find that not many people had found out the chart’s deceptiveness. This just goes to show how easy it is to manipulate visual depiction and spin a seemingly plausible story in a direction that best serves ones interest.

References –

Article – http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/06/daily-chart-1

The population data was taken from the world bank – https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_pop_totl&idim=country:CHN:IND&hl=en&dl=en#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=sp_pop_totl&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:CHN:IND:HKG:LUX&ifdim=region&tstart=1210575600000&tend=1336806000000&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false

The chart below gives an overview of the top ten global brands in the years 2006 to 2015.

The chart’s data sources are from interbrand.com who state that they use financial data, brand role and brand strength to come up with the ranking. Let’s take a closer look.

Audience – This data visualization is aimed at a general audience of internet users, particularly those who are interested in business trends – business people & the curious.

Action – The chart does not provide any actionable insights / they are not apparent at first glance (or even after a few glances).

Key Takeaway – The different brands that have been ranked the top ten globally in the years 2006 – 2015.

What I like about the chart –

Color – The overall choice of color is good. The chart is visually pleasing and the color palette doesn’t throw off users by distracting or misguiding their focus. The brand names are also clearly visible within the circles, care has been taken to make sure the font colors are in contrast to the surrounding circles to enhance readability.

Readability – The chart as a whole clearly communicates what it aims to present to the audience. There are no unnecessary elements like 3D shapes to deter readability. The brand legend on the right and the year scale at the bottom are clearly labelled. The bottom scale is also uniform with one year increments. The lines between the circles also add to the readability by helping the audience map the brand’s journey in the top ten ranks through the different years.

What I don’t like about the chart –

The metrics that are used to rank the brands aren’t stated on the chart.

Although this chart is thoughtfully designed, it lacks a number of communicative elements that could have made it much better. Although it is not apparent at first sight, some of the brands have completely dropped out of the top ten while others have emerged only in the middle. Some brands have reemerged after a hiatus only to gain a top position after having dropped out at a much lower rank.

After admiring the chart for its aesthetics, one is left with more questions than to begin with when one shifts focus to the trends/data.

Redesign –

A part of the chart’s audience is business users / inquisitive general users. And as such the chart would provide more value to the user by highlighting important turning points in a brand’s journey through hovering tooltips or content filtering. Selective / optional communicative depth means the chart would better cater to its users – business, inquisitive and casual. Inquisitive users would be able to focus on a brand of interest, delve deeper into the brands journey and possibly gain useful business insights.

I made a rough redesign concept based on the above pointers. You can view it here.

In the redesign, Toyota’s turbulent journey has been highlighted. Users can drill deeper into the whats and whys of how Toyota remerged in 2012 in the top ten and went on to get a hold of the 6th place in 2015.

Interactivity on this chart allows for a more rich and holistic contextual experience while hiding away that level of detail from less interested users.

Source : https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/686l51/top_10_global_brands_20062015_oc/

References : http://www.scribblelive.com/blog/2012/08/06/interaction-design-for-data-visualizations/

http://interbrand.com/best-brands/best-global-brands/methodology/

 

This infographic is designed to convey information about shopping and gifting trends over the holiday seasons in the years 2004 to 2015.

http://visual.ly/christmas-and-new-year-holidays-around-world

The entire infographic is full of badly executed visualizations, but I am going to pick one bar chart in particular to comment on – “Per Person Holiday Spending” which shows the average per customer spend over the years 2004 to 2015.

I liked a few things about this chart –

• The title is bold and clear, the user understands immediately what the chart is about. To that end, the designer has made all the titles bold to make them pop out and be effective.
• The x and y axes units are uniformly scaled with 1 year increments and 20$ increments respectively.

Things I didn’t like about the chart –

• COLORS – The colors are neither uniformly used nor visually pleasing. The designer has used 4 different colors in no particular sequence. On first glance, you think that a certain color (red for instance) means something in terms of year or amount being spent when it has no meaning at all. The colors have been randomly placed for each year.
• 3D BARS – 3D representation of this bar chart was unnecessary. If you look closely, the top of the bars are not uniform – the viewer’s perspective is skewed. Although this does not affect any information being communicated, it is an eye sore and adds to the overall visual chaos that this chart is.