3 ms·

"I once attended a one-day course by the renowned Information Visualization educator, Edward Tufte." And still they used doughnut charts.

by svnv 14y ago

bicknergseng 14y ago
At least it's not a 3D pie chart.
bcoates 14y ago
Serious question, what's wrong with doughnut charts?
- mjohn 14y ago
  The same reason that pie charts are not very effective - it's relatively hard to make comparisons between angles instead of lengths like in a bar chart. It's probably even harder with a doughnut. Here is a PDF article by Stephen Few about pie charts: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf
  - bcoates 14y ago
    That's a compelling article and I think I'm going to be a lot more cautious about using pie charts in the future, but the thin-doughnut design they're using here looks OK to me. When you're summarizing coarse relative size across arbitrary categories, bar charts and tables give your selection of categories too much weight: everyone looks at the biggest bar or the biggest number and it's really hard to measure a long tail distribution visually. If the message you're trying to send is, "nothing but X and Y matter, everything else combined is tiny", I still can't imagine a better visualization than a pie (or a doughnut).
    - codementum 14y ago
      You're absolutely right. Everyone harps on pie charts for being awful for element-to-element comparisons. This mainly stems from Tufte's work and experiments from Cleveland and McGill. However, in part-to-whole relationship tasks, pie charts can outperform bar charts, since in bar charts there is no true "whole". (In addition to Few's post, Kosara has more on this: http://eagereyes.org/criticism/in-defense-of-pie-charts http://eagereyes.org/criticism/in-defense-of-pie-charts)
      - cpeterso 14y ago
        A composite bar chart is like a pie chart that has been unrolled. The length of the bar is the "whole". http://www.ncsu.edu/labwrite/res/gh/gh-bargraph.html#compositebar http://www.ncsu.edu/labwrite/res/gh/gh-bargraph.html#composi...
  - heartbreak 14y ago
    I think the angle vs. length argument is precisely what makes doughnut charts better than pie charts.

"I once attended a one-day course by the renowned Information Visualization educator, Edward Tufte." And still they used doughnut charts.

by svnv 14y ago

"I once attended a one-day course by the renowned Information Visualization educator, Edward Tufte." And still they used doughnut charts.

bicknergseng 14y ago

At least it's not a 3D pie chart.

bcoates 14y ago

Serious question, what's wrong with doughnut charts?

mjohn 14y ago
The same reason that pie charts are not very effective - it's relatively hard to make comparisons between angles instead of lengths like in a bar chart. It's probably even harder with a doughnut. Here is a PDF article by Stephen Few about pie charts: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf
- bcoates 14y ago
  That's a compelling article and I think I'm going to be a lot more cautious about using pie charts in the future, but the thin-doughnut design they're using here looks OK to me. When you're summarizing coarse relative size across arbitrary categories, bar charts and tables give your selection of categories too much weight: everyone looks at the biggest bar or the biggest number and it's really hard to measure a long tail distribution visually. If the message you're trying to send is, "nothing but X and Y matter, everything else combined is tiny", I still can't imagine a better visualization than a pie (or a doughnut).
  - codementum 14y ago
    You're absolutely right. Everyone harps on pie charts for being awful for element-to-element comparisons. This mainly stems from Tufte's work and experiments from Cleveland and McGill. However, in part-to-whole relationship tasks, pie charts can outperform bar charts, since in bar charts there is no true "whole". (In addition to Few's post, Kosara has more on this: http://eagereyes.org/criticism/in-defense-of-pie-charts http://eagereyes.org/criticism/in-defense-of-pie-charts)
    - cpeterso 14y ago
      A composite bar chart is like a pie chart that has been unrolled. The length of the bar is the "whole". http://www.ncsu.edu/labwrite/res/gh/gh-bargraph.html#compositebar http://www.ncsu.edu/labwrite/res/gh/gh-bargraph.html#composi...
- heartbreak 14y ago
  I think the angle vs. length argument is precisely what makes doughnut charts better than pie charts.