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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 her
by 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 agoYou'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 agoA 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...