4 ms·
why not have a more granular heatmap as the main viz? coloring by state boundaries is really unintuitive and often misleading, even without Mercator projection
by leeoniya 2y ago
why not have a more granular heatmap as the main viz? coloring by state boundaries is really unintuitive and often misleading, even without Mercator projection criticisms.
- cheschire 2y agoIt depends on what your goal is, I suppose. If it's just to see the organization of data by administrative boundary, this is fine. For the people this company is selling to, that's probably even the ideal. However for us in the cheap seats, we most likely as a group want to see number of people impacted. For that, administrative boundaries are the inverse of what we want given administrative boundaries tend to shrink as population increases. Just goes to show the gap between B2C and B2B. In this case it seems this company knows their target audience, and it's not us.
- leeoniya 2y agoim not sure i follow the logic of state boundaries being a useful level of granularity for any audience. if some suburb of Austin has a power outage affecting 10k people in a 3mi radius, that means i get to see 8.7% of the contiguous US land area turn yellow unless i specifically select to zoom to TX to discover that the affected area is 10,000x smaller?
- cheschire 2y agoTexas is an especially interesting example you've chosen. For political reasons, people will often focus on the entire state due to its completely independent grid from surrounding states. Whether that tells the story you or I want to read or not, is something else entirely though.
- vonadz 2y agoBecause our priority is having the page load quickly, and having to load data for 3k+ counties on a national map would slow things down. The state view is a compromise between speed and giving the user enough info to then go more granular by checking the state view they're interested in.
- meta_x_ai 2y ago[dead]