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I can't understand why would somebody think that putting latest data on the left is a good idea.
by KptMarchewa 7y ago
I can't understand why would somebody think that putting latest data on the left is a good idea.
- pp19dd 7y agoThought the same thing, and came to a conclusion it was intended so it shows angry red first on smaller screens, the very punchline it was meant to show. The page is obviously not responsive optimized (vertical table for narrow layouts maybe?) but the importance of the data makes me overlook hastiness in which it was put together.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 7y agoMaybe they're from an Arabic speaking country :P
- dabeeeenster 7y agoOften cohort tables start with the most recent date on the left.
- 7777fps 7y agoIf it becomes very long then the data you lose to the scrollbar is the least relevant.
- overcast 7y agoThen don't put long data in a horizontal scrollbar. It's the worst possible UX ever.
- tylerchilds 7y agoWhat's your suggestion for improvement?
- overcast 7y agoHow about a neat line graph? There's only 8 data sources. Most of the space on their table is wasted by large left/right padding.
- vxNsr 7y agoYou can switch to City view and State view... those have a lot more than 8 data sources. This is pretty good UX if you're paying any attention at all.
- stickfigure 7y agoStart with it scrolled to the right?
- Mtinie 7y agoIt's a very good idea for time-series data which has a "freshness" aspect. If you started with the beginning of the dataset, February 18, you'd be adding significant weight to values which are comparative to, but no longer representative of, the current state of things on March 16. Not to mention, if it was first-to-last displayed left to right, you may miss the scroll bar and not understand the value of the data being displayed.
- koliber 7y agoYou can still put the most recent data on the right, and zoom in to show the rightmost data points. This is an established practice in stock charts and works well.
- Mtinie 7y agoFor charting, absolutely. If OpenTable had visualized this as a two-axis line chart I would have not have complained. My comment was addressing the OP's criticism regarding how tabular data was displayed in the article.
- jerry1979 7y agoI like that it shows the latest data without having to scroll.
- jasonshaev 7y agoI thought the same thing. More than anything, having the data in a table without a basic time series graph makes it harder to visualize the impact (for me).
- jcranmer 7y agoThe use of saturation of the background of the cell to indicate the severity makes it a combination of heatmap and table. Given the number of series in the data, this is actually probably a superior view of the data than trying to plot all the time series in a single line graph (it's dangerous to push beyond 6, IMHO), or devoting a single line graph to each comparison point. Tables are a vastly underrated means of conveying data.
- miguelmota 7y agoPeople read from left to right so it makes sense that the latest information would be on the left side for a time series table that keeps on growing.
- daRealDodo 7y ago...what?
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoPeople (in this language) read from left to right, so they're used to what is on the left coming before what is on the right. If you have a time series that keeps growing, trim or scale it to the display size, or change the sample rate, or give some UI options to let them vary those parameters. Don't ask people to invert their expectation of "before" and "after". Those are too fundamental.
- miguelmota 7y agoI agree that the presentation using a horizontal scrolling table is not the best. Maybe a vertical scrolling table with the x and y switched would of made more sense.
- milesskorpen 7y agoWe did it because we've got quite a few days in there, and would prefer not to have people scroll when we update the data on a daily basis.
- enraged_camel 7y agoThanks, I always open this on my mobile phone or vertical monitor, and on the previous version (the google sheet direct link), always had to scroll right, which was annoying.
- starpilot 7y agoHave it by default show the rightmost portion, so that people can scroll to the left if they want? This is how Yahoo Finance shows a stock chart.
- milesskorpen 7y agoCould do that. Took less time to change the ordering so we could get this out.
- jcims 7y agoI saw it before and like it this way better. Anyway graphs would be nice eventually but the heatmap works pretty well. Thanks for doing this. It's a very interesting perspective into the impact this is having.
- markdown 7y agoThat's bad enough, but they also put the month on the left (3/16 instead of 16/3). Odd for an international app to treat a date like that when only one country of note records dates in that silly way.