7 ms·

Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

152 points by AndrewDucker 14y ago

Toshio 14y ago
Hey Nielsen, we don't care who's paying you, windowsphone will NEVER be the third ecosystem.
simonh 14y ago
Maybe they hired whoever does the Fox News info graphics. http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/12/12/today-in-dishonest-fox-news-charts/185162 http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/12/12/today-in-dishonest-f...
jjdigitized 14y ago
Quite staggering when the proportions are corrected in the diagram.
einhverfr 14y ago
Why? Because if you make them perfectly proportional, the labels are hard to read. ;-) For example, try actually making sense out of the second diagram on that site. It's far harder to read than the first. You can actually only make sense of it by cross-referencing with the first diagram.
- nailer 14y ago
  The second diagram is hard has what seems to be bitmap fonts and uses a flowing set of similar colours, making it harder to distinguish between the manufacturers, rather than distinct ones. While making for bad UX, it doesn't change the truth of the information at all, and it would be easy to fix these issues. Edit: Looks like someone already has: http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their-graphics/ http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their...
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    Fonts are still smaller to read, and Symbian, etc. are omitted from the labels. It also conveys a lot less information.
    - mikeash 14y ago
      Better to convey less information than incorrect information.
- Havoc 14y ago
  So now its misleading...but thats OK because at least one can read it?!? What kind of logic is that?
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    All kinds of graphs are misleading if we expect them to be visually perfect. If you look at http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb for example, their graph goes from about 30 to about 31, so if you read it the same way you might think Facebook stock has been almost to 0 a bunch.... The question IMO is not whether it is visually misleading but whether it conveys information in a usable form, and whether the information it conveys in that form is misleading, and I don't see it. If we adopt a visually perfect line doesn't that mean all graphs must be linear (no plotting on non-linear scales, even though this is useful in some contexts), start with an origin of (0,0) and so forth? What percentage of graphs do you see that obey these rules?
    - route66 14y ago
      One-0eyed person here. Let me help you out. The Nielsen graph clearly represents 51% Android as about 33%, apple's 34% as one quarter and the Blackberry als one-fifth. If you prefer readability of the labels over more-or-less-correctness of a graph which suggests it covers a full 100% and it's subdivisions you should maybe just use a table. As in Excel. A 30-31 x-scale is misleadin but showing 10% as 20% though is more than sloppy because you do show the "origin". This has got nothing to do with visually perfect.
- BasDirks 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_(chart)#Features_of_a_chart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_(chart)#Features_of_a_ch...
kwekly 14y ago
That is incredible -- I'm pretty sure a professional statistical research organisation appreciates power of manipulation of humans through visual effect. If they pull the line that it was a mistake on the artistic front to get the text to fit into the boxes, I'll file that under criminal neglect.
flyosity 14y ago
The original person who noticed this was a writer from 9to5mac and he made his own more accurate graphic a few days before this post was written. http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their-graphics/ http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their...
- latch 14y ago
  and I was having a hard time telling what % HTC for WinPhone 7 had in the OP. Again, this version might be proportionally more accurate, but it drastically reduces the amount of information. Nielsen's is the best so far, by far.
  - nkoren 14y ago
    I really don't think that information which is legible but completely wrong is preferable to information which is slightly less legible but completely correct.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    Hardly! The point of the graph is to show at a glance who has the most market share. Neilsen's graph doesn't do that at all. If the problem is not showing all the information, then find a totally different type of graph. Or put them into multiple graphs, one showing the 4 biggest players, then an "other" segment. Then show another graph of the "Other" segment and show the proportions in that graph.
    - klawed 14y ago
      Agreed. The "manufacturer" dimension given that 4 of the 7 OS's only have a single manufacture. Pull out the manufacturer data, size the blocks properly and you have a very informative chart.
  - BasDirks 14y ago
    It reduces the amount of information? So you would prefer the wrong information instead? You're pretending OP tried to make a better graph, when clearly he only wanted to show the inaccuracy of the Nielsen graph. Are you trolling?
jezclaremurugan 14y ago
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. - Hanlon's razor
- diminish 14y ago
  Stupidity is the ultimate malice.
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    Such a cop out.
  - baq 14y ago
    mother nature is a bitch.
- DennisP 14y ago
  Cipolla's Basic Laws of Human Stupidity 1) Everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. 2) The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. 3) A stupid person is a person who caused losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. 4) Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. 5) A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. Source: http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/stupidity/ http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/stupidity/
latch 14y ago
I prefer Nielsen's version by a wide margin. You can make your graph as perfect as you want, but that doesn't make it better or more useful. After 2 minutes I still can't tell what % HTC WinPhone 7 has...
bborud 14y ago
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor
qxcv 14y ago
This looks suspiciously like logarithmic scaling which, as XKCD readers will attest, is a pretty typical technique for representing statistics which have differences measured in orders-of-magnitude. I'm not sure what all the panic on here is for, it's not as if Nielson only bumped Nokia, RIM and Microsoft's column widths.
- apl 14y ago
  > This looks suspiciously like logarithmic scaling which, > as XKCD readers will attest, is a pretty typical > technique for representing statistics which have > differences measured in orders-of-magnitude. It is, but never implicitly. Sure, you can get the actual proportions from reading the markings at the bottom, but then what's the point of visualizing in the first place? Either make your logarithmic scaling explicit and clear (as is done in scientific graphs), or use generally assumed linear scaling. > it's not as if Nielson only bumped Nokia, RIM and > Microsoft's column widths. No, but it amounts to the same thing.
- wisty 14y ago
  Why use a logarithmic scaling for an area chart? Given the data it's presenting, a logarithmic chart is completely inappropriate. If I take the rectangle of "HTC / Android" and add it to the rectangle of "HTC / Windows", what do I get?
  - Dylan16807 14y ago
    If it was proportional you wouldn't be able to read the windows label in the first place. I like this setup. Works as well here as it does in disk manager, the first example I can think of commonly visiting with log scaled area.
Foomandoonian 14y ago
I found it odd that there were no comments on the original Nielsen blog post — http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=32494 http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=32494 — so I left one politely pointing out the inaccuracies. It's being held in moderation. I doubt it'll ever see the light.
- Foomandoonian 14y ago
  24 hours later, and I think it's pretty clear that Nielsen aren't accepting any comments on that article.
  - Foomandoonian 14y ago
    To my surprise, Nielsen have (after a delay) published all comments AND fixed the graphic. > Update 7/16: The original graphic in this post included a chart depicting U.S. smartphone manufacturer share which did not scale proportionately. While all data points in the original post and graphic remain accurate, the post has since been updated with a correctly scaled image.
AndrewDucker 14y ago
Apologies for the fact that the legend on the second photo isn't as legible as it could be. My fault for resizing it to the same size as the original Nielsen image for easy comparison. I've now updated it so that you can click through to a larger version of the image. Also, since Livejournal seems to be having a go-slow, here's a link to the two images: http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb317/AndrewDucker/12.png http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb317/AndrewDucker/12.png http://www.richardclegg.org/graphics/phoneshare.png http://www.richardclegg.org/graphics/phoneshare.png http://www.richardclegg.org/graphics/phoneshare.pdf http://www.richardclegg.org/graphics/phoneshare.pdf (less jaggy) And here is 9to5Mac with an even better one: http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their-graphics/ http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their...
- chris_wot 14y ago
  Yow! Can you do something about those fonts? So many jaggies... can barely read them :( Update: any chance you could get two graphs made up? The first only showing the biggest six players, and an "Other" that is the rest of the market share, and then another which then takes the "Other" results and plots the market share again in a totally seperate graph?
alan_cx 14y ago
I would suggest that they are using the wrong type of diagram to represent the data that they have. Clearly its messed up because of labelling. If the data is such that labelling causes misrepresentation, it has to be the wrong diagram. The whole point of these diagrams is that one can look at it and immediately get a feel for the proportions dictated by the data. If is look like a third, it should be a third. If you have to change that, then its the wrong diagram. Or a deliberate attempt to misrepresent. I'm betting that some one wanted to use the new funky type of diagram because its new and funky, instead of an appropriate one.
mkaltenecker 14y ago
It’s quite astonishing that so many people here prefer readability over correctness. What is wrong with you? Readability is optional. Correctness is not. That’s obviously the wrong tradeoff. Never outright manipulate your data to make it more readable! If you can’t make your data readable enough without manipulating it you just can’t present your data that way. Period. Find a better way. (I do not think there is any malice involved, though. Just pure stupidity. I mean, look at the amount of people around here arguing for readability over correctness. If they are out here, some are also working for Nielsen.)
- kwekly 14y ago
  There's more at stake than that -- malice or not, a simple, tidy diagram can bypass a human's critical faculties and increase the feeling that the false data (and whatever it's conclusion) are more true. For a statistical research organisation, this is straight up neglect! Part of my job involves electrical drafting, and though I'm positively anal about my drawings, if I manipulate the design to make the drawing more clear and presentable, it's a snowball's chance I'd ever be excused. In my case, the risk is starting a fire in a power supply; in theirs, manipulating the market death of a product, however many dollars that might entail. Professionals have higher standards in their field, precisely because we trust them with expert information and give more weight to their decisions. Stupidity is no excuse in this case.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    How much does it matter, though? A pie chart would paint a very different picture, with iOS as a clear minority.
    - mkaltenecker 14y ago
      How that? Android would be 183°, iOS would be 122°, RIM would be 32°. You could easily see that Android is slightly above 50% – but I’m not really sure how the iOS marketshare would look markedly different. Since 50% isn’t really a very important threshold (though that could be argued) I would very much argue against using a pie chart. (I prefer areas or lengths to angles.) Plus, a pie chart wouldn’t make it easy to add platform subdivisions.
aneth4 14y ago
This is just generally a horrible way to make a chart that is intended to communicate relative size - it's worse than a pie chart because visually it's much harder to compare sizes of horizontal and vertical rectangles. To compound that by appearing to have proportional sizes, but being completely wrong, is humorously incompetent. Reminds me of those joke maps showing NYC as dominating the US.
- Terretta 14y ago
  > it's worse than a pie chart because visually it's much harder to compare sizes of horizontal and vertical rectangles Research I've seen suggests the exact opposite -- that people are great at estimating area of rectangles, and terrible at estimating area of circular or triangular shapes. They know which circle is bigger, but don't have any idea by how much bigger. That said, pie chart slices work for simple data not because of area, but because all you have to compare is the simple length of the circumference segments. That's a single dimension, and easy to compare. See "Pizzas: or Square? Psychophysical Biases in Area Comparisons", http://groups.haas.berkeley.edu/marketing/PAPERS/PRIYA/p5.pdf http://groups.haas.berkeley.edu/marketing/PAPERS/PRIYA/p5.pd... for how people lean on a single dimension for size or area comparisons. Unfortunately, as this cell phone OS chart is trying to support comparison of multiple sets and subsets, circumference segments alone are inadequate to convey the relative sizes of the sets. The more complex the information, the more the usefulness of the nested rectangles versus pie chart slices becomes clear. Imagine for example a visual representation of drive space usage by directory and subdirectory. Here is a drive space chart using nested rectangles: http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ScreenShots/1_0-FoldersBujumbura.png http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ScreenShots/1_0-Folde... For comparison, here is an attempt do do the same using pie charts: http://www.daisydiskapp.com/img/d4.png http://www.daisydiskapp.com/img/d4.png In fact, if you use both apps, you'll see DaisyDisk is not able to give you the "grand perspective" in a single view, it requires clicking to zoom in on a slice it then expands to a full pie to drill down.
  - ameasure 14y ago
    If you're interested in comparing the various market shares, a simple bar chart is much easier to understand, just look at which one is taller. With these rectangle/tree map things, I never know what to think: well this one is wider, but this other one is taller; you have to do multiplication just to compare 2 market shares.
keithpeter 14y ago
Can anyone explain the advantage of the original graphic over a nicely captioned table of data? Mind you, this is a good statistics lesson. My teenage students might get quite interested in a 'discussion' of the relative merits of various kinds of phone, before representing the data and then comparing it to UK. US Mobile phone market share by OS and maker Android 51% Samsung 17% HTC 14% Motorola 11% Other 9% iOS (Apple) 34% Blackberry 9% Windows Mobile 3% HTC 2.9% Palm 0.1% Other 0.2% Windows 7 1.3% HTC 0.5% Samsung 0.5% Nokia 0.3% Symbian 0.9% WebOS 0.6% Above needs a clearer indication that the OS percentages are totals, and then split by manufacturer. I might try a two entry table so you could get market share by manufacturer or by OS, but then quite a few are single OS manufacturers. I find the rounding of the larger market shares to nearest percent a bit worrying given that Palm is being listed as a discrete total. The 'rounding error' on Apple's % could be bigger than HTC/Windows 7 for instance
- Terretta 14y ago
  In Europe, set theory is taught early on. In the US where it is not, the average person seems challenged to quickly visualize the relative significance of sets and subsets of numbers from a table. In any case, I think the correctly drawn rectangular chart conveys the significance in a single holistic glance, while the table above requires quite a few "memory registers" for comparing the sets and their parts.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    Alas, set theory and the Venn diagram approach has been off the UK syllabus for some time as well as in the US. I take your point about the correctly drawn/direct proportion version of the graphic being more quickly assimilated. I just think that with such a 'dynamic range' of data (0.1% compared with 0.2% in one category compared with 17% vs 14% in another) any kind of graphic will require very high resolution to convey the overall picture. I suspect that may have been the reason for the non-proportionality in the original Nielsen graphic.
- 14y ago
joe-mccann 14y ago
This is precisely why I wrote this article on why ecosystems are what's important -- not a fancy new handset. Nokia and RIM are near almost certain death in the next 18-24 months. http://subprint.com/blog/its-the-ecosystem,-stupid http://subprint.com/blog/its-the-ecosystem,-stupid
neeleshs 14y ago
Is there a cached version somewhere? nginx is 404'ing this page now
- Tobu 14y ago
  The entire journal seems to have disappeared. The post was originally on Dreamwidth, where you can still read it: http://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/2727548.html http://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/2727548.html
thefox 14y ago
404. http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/ http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/ also returns a 404 side.
mattmalin 14y ago
I also found the inaccuracy of the chart awful and looked into producing a correctly scaled version: http://i.imgur.com/8wgAk.png http://i.imgur.com/8wgAk.png The main problem was being able to still display readable text, which should lead to using another way of visualising the data instead of leading to using an incorrect graphic. I also looked into using a stacked bar chart to display the information, more information (and code for generating plot, though I didn't put too much time into making it look pretty) here: http://www.actuarially.co.uk/post/27156208823/smartphone-operating-system-share-mosaic-plot http://www.actuarially.co.uk/post/27156208823/smartphone-ope...
Kilimanjaro 14y ago
A simpler graphic: One in three smartphones is an iPhone.
Foomandoonian 14y ago
This story used to be called 'Why is Nielsen misrepresenting smartphone market share?' I thought that was a brilliant headline, and it made me jump into the conversation here. I doubt the new title, 'Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS', would have caught my eye. Why do the titles on HN keep getting neutered?
- janardanyri 14y ago
  Headline cleverness is a zero sum game. I'd rather have drier titles instead of a psychological hacking competition, and scan for content quality (as loosely indicated by upvotes) and subject relevancy.
  - Foomandoonian 14y ago
    Hm, one of us doesn't have a good grasp of what 'zero-sum game' means. In truth, it may be me, because you lost me there. I wasn't praising the headline because it was 'clever' though. I think the question it raised highlighted a bigger issue that still hasn't really been examined. People are focusing on the importance (or not) of accurate charts. I'm more interested in understanding why a company that exists to provide a 'complete understanding of what consumers watch and buy' is misrepresenting data.

152 points by AndrewDucker 14y ago

Hey Nielsen, we don't care who's paying you, windowsphone will NEVER be the third ecosystem.

Maybe they hired whoever does the Fox News info graphics. http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/12/12/today-in-dishonest-fox-news-charts/185162 http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/12/12/today-in-dishonest-f...

jjdigitized 14y ago

Quite staggering when the proportions are corrected in the diagram.

einhverfr 14y ago

Why? Because if you make them perfectly proportional, the labels are hard to read. ;-) For example, try actually making sense out of the second diagram on that site. It's far harder to read than the first. You can actually only make sense of it by cross-referencing with the first diagram.

nailer 14y ago
The second diagram is hard has what seems to be bitmap fonts and uses a flowing set of similar colours, making it harder to distinguish between the manufacturers, rather than distinct ones. While making for bad UX, it doesn't change the truth of the information at all, and it would be easy to fix these issues. Edit: Looks like someone already has: http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their-graphics/ http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their...
- einhverfr 14y ago
  Fonts are still smaller to read, and Symbian, etc. are omitted from the labels. It also conveys a lot less information.
  - mikeash 14y ago
    Better to convey less information than incorrect information.
Havoc 14y ago
So now its misleading...but thats OK because at least one can read it?!? What kind of logic is that?
- einhverfr 14y ago
  All kinds of graphs are misleading if we expect them to be visually perfect. If you look at http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb for example, their graph goes from about 30 to about 31, so if you read it the same way you might think Facebook stock has been almost to 0 a bunch.... The question IMO is not whether it is visually misleading but whether it conveys information in a usable form, and whether the information it conveys in that form is misleading, and I don't see it. If we adopt a visually perfect line doesn't that mean all graphs must be linear (no plotting on non-linear scales, even though this is useful in some contexts), start with an origin of (0,0) and so forth? What percentage of graphs do you see that obey these rules?
  - route66 14y ago
    One-0eyed person here. Let me help you out. The Nielsen graph clearly represents 51% Android as about 33%, apple's 34% as one quarter and the Blackberry als one-fifth. If you prefer readability of the labels over more-or-less-correctness of a graph which suggests it covers a full 100% and it's subdivisions you should maybe just use a table. As in Excel. A 30-31 x-scale is misleadin but showing 10% as 20% though is more than sloppy because you do show the "origin". This has got nothing to do with visually perfect.
BasDirks 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_(chart)#Features_of_a_chart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_(chart)#Features_of_a_ch...

kwekly 14y ago

That is incredible -- I'm pretty sure a professional statistical research organisation appreciates power of manipulation of humans through visual effect. If they pull the line that it was a mistake on the artistic front to get the text to fit into the boxes, I'll file that under criminal neglect.

flyosity 14y ago

The original person who noticed this was a writer from 9to5mac and he made his own more accurate graphic a few days before this post was written. http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their-graphics/ http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their...

latch 14y ago
and I was having a hard time telling what % HTC for WinPhone 7 had in the OP. Again, this version might be proportionally more accurate, but it drastically reduces the amount of information. Nielsen's is the best so far, by far.
- nkoren 14y ago
  I really don't think that information which is legible but completely wrong is preferable to information which is slightly less legible but completely correct.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  Hardly! The point of the graph is to show at a glance who has the most market share. Neilsen's graph doesn't do that at all. If the problem is not showing all the information, then find a totally different type of graph. Or put them into multiple graphs, one showing the 4 biggest players, then an "other" segment. Then show another graph of the "Other" segment and show the proportions in that graph.
  - klawed 14y ago
    Agreed. The "manufacturer" dimension given that 4 of the 7 OS's only have a single manufacture. Pull out the manufacturer data, size the blocks properly and you have a very informative chart.
- BasDirks 14y ago
  It reduces the amount of information? So you would prefer the wrong information instead? You're pretending OP tried to make a better graph, when clearly he only wanted to show the inaccuracy of the Nielsen graph. Are you trolling?

jezclaremurugan 14y ago

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. - Hanlon's razor

diminish 14y ago
Stupidity is the ultimate malice.
- Karunamon 14y ago
  Such a cop out.
- baq 14y ago
  mother nature is a bitch.
DennisP 14y ago
Cipolla's Basic Laws of Human Stupidity 1) Everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. 2) The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. 3) A stupid person is a person who caused losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. 4) Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. 5) A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. Source: http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/stupidity/ http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/stupidity/

latch 14y ago

I prefer Nielsen's version by a wide margin. You can make your graph as perfect as you want, but that doesn't make it better or more useful. After 2 minutes I still can't tell what % HTC WinPhone 7 has...

bborud 14y ago

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor

qxcv 14y ago

This looks suspiciously like logarithmic scaling which, as XKCD readers will attest, is a pretty typical technique for representing statistics which have differences measured in orders-of-magnitude. I'm not sure what all the panic on here is for, it's not as if Nielson only bumped Nokia, RIM and Microsoft's column widths.

apl 14y ago
> This looks suspiciously like logarithmic scaling which, > as XKCD readers will attest, is a pretty typical > technique for representing statistics which have > differences measured in orders-of-magnitude. It is, but never implicitly. Sure, you can get the actual proportions from reading the markings at the bottom, but then what's the point of visualizing in the first place? Either make your logarithmic scaling explicit and clear (as is done in scientific graphs), or use generally assumed linear scaling. > it's not as if Nielson only bumped Nokia, RIM and > Microsoft's column widths. No, but it amounts to the same thing.
wisty 14y ago
Why use a logarithmic scaling for an area chart? Given the data it's presenting, a logarithmic chart is completely inappropriate. If I take the rectangle of "HTC / Android" and add it to the rectangle of "HTC / Windows", what do I get?
- Dylan16807 14y ago
  If it was proportional you wouldn't be able to read the windows label in the first place. I like this setup. Works as well here as it does in disk manager, the first example I can think of commonly visiting with log scaled area.

Foomandoonian 14y ago

I found it odd that there were no comments on the original Nielsen blog post — http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=32494 http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=32494 — so I left one politely pointing out the inaccuracies. It's being held in moderation. I doubt it'll ever see the light.

Foomandoonian 14y ago
24 hours later, and I think it's pretty clear that Nielsen aren't accepting any comments on that article.
- Foomandoonian 14y ago
  To my surprise, Nielsen have (after a delay) published all comments AND fixed the graphic. > Update 7/16: The original graphic in this post included a chart depicting U.S. smartphone manufacturer share which did not scale proportionately. While all data points in the original post and graphic remain accurate, the post has since been updated with a correctly scaled image.

AndrewDucker 14y ago

Apologies for the fact that the legend on the second photo isn't as legible as it could be. My fault for resizing it to the same size as the original Nielsen image for easy comparison. I've now updated it so that you can click through to a larger version of the image. Also, since Livejournal seems to be having a go-slow, here's a link to the two images: http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb317/AndrewDucker/12.png http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb317/AndrewDucker/12.png http://www.richardclegg.org/graphics/phoneshare.png http://www.richardclegg.org/graphics/phoneshare.png http://www.richardclegg.org/graphics/phoneshare.pdf http://www.richardclegg.org/graphics/phoneshare.pdf (less jaggy) And here is 9to5Mac with an even better one: http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their-graphics/ http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their...

chris_wot 14y ago
Yow! Can you do something about those fonts? So many jaggies... can barely read them :( Update: any chance you could get two graphs made up? The first only showing the biggest six players, and an "Other" that is the rest of the market share, and then another which then takes the "Other" results and plots the market share again in a totally seperate graph?

alan_cx 14y ago

I would suggest that they are using the wrong type of diagram to represent the data that they have. Clearly its messed up because of labelling. If the data is such that labelling causes misrepresentation, it has to be the wrong diagram. The whole point of these diagrams is that one can look at it and immediately get a feel for the proportions dictated by the data. If is look like a third, it should be a third. If you have to change that, then its the wrong diagram. Or a deliberate attempt to misrepresent. I'm betting that some one wanted to use the new funky type of diagram because its new and funky, instead of an appropriate one.

mkaltenecker 14y ago

It’s quite astonishing that so many people here prefer readability over correctness. What is wrong with you? Readability is optional. Correctness is not. That’s obviously the wrong tradeoff. Never outright manipulate your data to make it more readable! If you can’t make your data readable enough without manipulating it you just can’t present your data that way. Period. Find a better way. (I do not think there is any malice involved, though. Just pure stupidity. I mean, look at the amount of people around here arguing for readability over correctness. If they are out here, some are also working for Nielsen.)

kwekly 14y ago
There's more at stake than that -- malice or not, a simple, tidy diagram can bypass a human's critical faculties and increase the feeling that the false data (and whatever it's conclusion) are more true. For a statistical research organisation, this is straight up neglect! Part of my job involves electrical drafting, and though I'm positively anal about my drawings, if I manipulate the design to make the drawing more clear and presentable, it's a snowball's chance I'd ever be excused. In my case, the risk is starting a fire in a power supply; in theirs, manipulating the market death of a product, however many dollars that might entail. Professionals have higher standards in their field, precisely because we trust them with expert information and give more weight to their decisions. Stupidity is no excuse in this case.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  How much does it matter, though? A pie chart would paint a very different picture, with iOS as a clear minority.
  - mkaltenecker 14y ago
    How that? Android would be 183°, iOS would be 122°, RIM would be 32°. You could easily see that Android is slightly above 50% – but I’m not really sure how the iOS marketshare would look markedly different. Since 50% isn’t really a very important threshold (though that could be argued) I would very much argue against using a pie chart. (I prefer areas or lengths to angles.) Plus, a pie chart wouldn’t make it easy to add platform subdivisions.

aneth4 14y ago

This is just generally a horrible way to make a chart that is intended to communicate relative size - it's worse than a pie chart because visually it's much harder to compare sizes of horizontal and vertical rectangles. To compound that by appearing to have proportional sizes, but being completely wrong, is humorously incompetent. Reminds me of those joke maps showing NYC as dominating the US.

Terretta 14y ago
> it's worse than a pie chart because visually it's much harder to compare sizes of horizontal and vertical rectangles Research I've seen suggests the exact opposite -- that people are great at estimating area of rectangles, and terrible at estimating area of circular or triangular shapes. They know which circle is bigger, but don't have any idea by how much bigger. That said, pie chart slices work for simple data not because of area, but because all you have to compare is the simple length of the circumference segments. That's a single dimension, and easy to compare. See "Pizzas: or Square? Psychophysical Biases in Area Comparisons", http://groups.haas.berkeley.edu/marketing/PAPERS/PRIYA/p5.pdf http://groups.haas.berkeley.edu/marketing/PAPERS/PRIYA/p5.pd... for how people lean on a single dimension for size or area comparisons. Unfortunately, as this cell phone OS chart is trying to support comparison of multiple sets and subsets, circumference segments alone are inadequate to convey the relative sizes of the sets. The more complex the information, the more the usefulness of the nested rectangles versus pie chart slices becomes clear. Imagine for example a visual representation of drive space usage by directory and subdirectory. Here is a drive space chart using nested rectangles: http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ScreenShots/1_0-FoldersBujumbura.png http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ScreenShots/1_0-Folde... For comparison, here is an attempt do do the same using pie charts: http://www.daisydiskapp.com/img/d4.png http://www.daisydiskapp.com/img/d4.png In fact, if you use both apps, you'll see DaisyDisk is not able to give you the "grand perspective" in a single view, it requires clicking to zoom in on a slice it then expands to a full pie to drill down.
- ameasure 14y ago
  If you're interested in comparing the various market shares, a simple bar chart is much easier to understand, just look at which one is taller. With these rectangle/tree map things, I never know what to think: well this one is wider, but this other one is taller; you have to do multiplication just to compare 2 market shares.

keithpeter 14y ago

Can anyone explain the advantage of the original graphic over a nicely captioned table of data? Mind you, this is a good statistics lesson. My teenage students might get quite interested in a 'discussion' of the relative merits of various kinds of phone, before representing the data and then comparing it to UK. US Mobile phone market share by OS and maker Android 51% Samsung 17% HTC 14% Motorola 11% Other 9% iOS (Apple) 34% Blackberry 9% Windows Mobile 3% HTC 2.9% Palm 0.1% Other 0.2% Windows 7 1.3% HTC 0.5% Samsung 0.5% Nokia 0.3% Symbian 0.9% WebOS 0.6% Above needs a clearer indication that the OS percentages are totals, and then split by manufacturer. I might try a two entry table so you could get market share by manufacturer or by OS, but then quite a few are single OS manufacturers. I find the rounding of the larger market shares to nearest percent a bit worrying given that Palm is being listed as a discrete total. The 'rounding error' on Apple's % could be bigger than HTC/Windows 7 for instance

Terretta 14y ago
In Europe, set theory is taught early on. In the US where it is not, the average person seems challenged to quickly visualize the relative significance of sets and subsets of numbers from a table. In any case, I think the correctly drawn rectangular chart conveys the significance in a single holistic glance, while the table above requires quite a few "memory registers" for comparing the sets and their parts.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  Alas, set theory and the Venn diagram approach has been off the UK syllabus for some time as well as in the US. I take your point about the correctly drawn/direct proportion version of the graphic being more quickly assimilated. I just think that with such a 'dynamic range' of data (0.1% compared with 0.2% in one category compared with 17% vs 14% in another) any kind of graphic will require very high resolution to convey the overall picture. I suspect that may have been the reason for the non-proportionality in the original Nielsen graphic.
14y ago

joe-mccann 14y ago

This is precisely why I wrote this article on why ecosystems are what's important -- not a fancy new handset. Nokia and RIM are near almost certain death in the next 18-24 months. http://subprint.com/blog/its-the-ecosystem,-stupid http://subprint.com/blog/its-the-ecosystem,-stupid

neeleshs 14y ago

Is there a cached version somewhere? nginx is 404'ing this page now

Tobu 14y ago
The entire journal seems to have disappeared. The post was originally on Dreamwidth, where you can still read it: http://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/2727548.html http://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/2727548.html

thefox 14y ago

404. http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/ http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/ also returns a 404 side.

mattmalin 14y ago

I also found the inaccuracy of the chart awful and looked into producing a correctly scaled version: http://i.imgur.com/8wgAk.png http://i.imgur.com/8wgAk.png The main problem was being able to still display readable text, which should lead to using another way of visualising the data instead of leading to using an incorrect graphic. I also looked into using a stacked bar chart to display the information, more information (and code for generating plot, though I didn't put too much time into making it look pretty) here: http://www.actuarially.co.uk/post/27156208823/smartphone-operating-system-share-mosaic-plot http://www.actuarially.co.uk/post/27156208823/smartphone-ope...

Kilimanjaro 14y ago

A simpler graphic: One in three smartphones is an iPhone.

Foomandoonian 14y ago

This story used to be called 'Why is Nielsen misrepresenting smartphone market share?' I thought that was a brilliant headline, and it made me jump into the conversation here. I doubt the new title, 'Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS', would have caught my eye. Why do the titles on HN keep getting neutered?

janardanyri 14y ago
Headline cleverness is a zero sum game. I'd rather have drier titles instead of a psychological hacking competition, and scan for content quality (as loosely indicated by upvotes) and subject relevancy.
- Foomandoonian 14y ago
  Hm, one of us doesn't have a good grasp of what 'zero-sum game' means. In truth, it may be me, because you lost me there. I wasn't praising the headline because it was 'clever' though. I think the question it raised highlighted a bigger issue that still hasn't really been examined. People are focusing on the importance (or not) of accurate charts. I'm more interested in understanding why a company that exists to provide a 'complete understanding of what consumers watch and buy' is misrepresenting data.