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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

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.