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I applaud the authors for attempting a new kind of data visualization. However, I find two major flaws in the graph: 1) Because the perimeter of a circle grows
by jacoblyles 17y ago
I applaud the authors for attempting a new kind of data visualization. However, I find two major flaws in the graph:
1) Because the perimeter of a circle grows as a function of the radius, an arc must grow just to represent the same share. This is misleading, giving an impression of growth where there is none.
2) It is difficult to tell which arcs on one side of the circle go with arcs on other parts of the circle. There is simply too much distance between them to judge accurately which arcs belong to the same time period.
- sp332 17y agoYeah, but then the graph wouldn't look like a Firefox logo :)
- drhowarddrfine 17y agoYep. This is brilliant!
- InclinedPlane 17y agoThis is misleading, giving an impression of growth where there is none. But there is growth. Perhaps it's the static percentage based graph that's misleading, I find this graph of more or less the same data rather intriguing: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3328/3421742213_db946c5ddf_o.png http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3328/3421742213_db946c5ddf_o....
- mbrubeck 17y agoAnd since the absolute total has grown close to linearly, the tree rings are not that misleading after all.
- jacoblyles 17y agoIs the market really growing by 2 x PI x the width of one of their slices? That would be quite the coincidence. Your link is much easier to read.
- Periodic 17y agoThe market doesn't have to grow by 2 * PI anything. It's just a constant. Since the radius grows linearly, you can map any linearly growing series of data and you'll find it looks good in this presentation format.
- jacoblyles 17y agoYou're right, just need to multiply by some scaling factor, as long as the growth stays linear.
- Dilpil 17y agoSo the way to resolve this would be to calculate the total users for each browser each year, and scale that entire ring outwards.
- Periodic 17y agoThe growth of the size of an arc is only misleading because the graph naturally draws you to compare different browsers as a percentage of the market. Since the market has grown basically linearly, the arcs may actually be in direct proportion to the actual number of users, in which case there is very real growth. The confusion comes when you see growth of absolute terms when the more interesting statistic is what the relative growth is. Particularly, if one browser's arc remained the same size on each ring you might assume that it is staying the same. It has the same number of users, but it is losing prominence.
- maudineormsby 17y agoKeep in mind that this is a tech demo used to show a visualization of someone else's data (W3C in this case). So the author likely cared a lot more for visual appear and demonstrating functionality than for the way the graph might be interpreted.
- iamwil 17y agoNot only that, but the dataset doesn't have even time spacing. In the earlier years, it skipped a couple months, and only recently did it start to do every month. However, that's not reflected in the visualization, and we're lead to believe that this is sampled with even steps over time.
- jasford 17y agoThen again, the number of users on the Internet has grown every year, so even if a browser just held its % market share steady, that would mean an increase in quantity of users.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]