Teaching:TUW - UE InfoVis WS 2008/09 - Gruppe 01 - Aufgabe 2
Aufgabenstellung
Exercise 2
Table to evaluate
Critics on the table
- The titel doesn´t contain of which year(s) the Top 25 is and you don´t know which period of the year is used. Because the reference source is from March 2007 and it is not possible that the "whole" years 2006 and 2007 are compared.
- The table shows the Top 25, but from the the way the lines are ordered its not easy to get the rank for example the Top 7. Further it´s not easy to follow the horizontal line, because there are grids and rules missing.
- The mean of the colum "Increase/Decrease" is not clear, what shall it mean?
- In the colum "Percent" after every data the symbol % is missing and only in some cases a decimal place is published.
- The column "2006" and "2007" is not in chronological order.
- The subtitle electronic editions is used two times.
- A comma is placed to the left of every three digits of numbers and the data aligne centered. So the direct comparison with the other lines is not possible - you get an false impression of the size of the number.
- Because of the way numbers are written and read, aligning them to the left or
center makes them difficult to interpret.
- The column “-Frequency” is not important because there is only one exception.
- It is difficult to track across the rows with this spacing.
- The name of the district is just published in same cases.
Correction on the table
grafic of new table
Which changes have been made? Why is the changed one better than the original table?
- Titel sollte sich aufs Jahr beziehen – Top 25 (2007); weiters bezieht es sich auf USA oder ? => Top 25 USA Newspaper … 2007
- 2006/2007 im Titel, damit Vergleich klar
- bei Prozent + oder -
Nicht nur Prozent sondern auch % (Symbolkraft,visuelle Typen) Place a percentage sign (i.e., %) immediately to the right of every percentage value (e.g., 8.75%).
- Negative Zahlen in Klammer ? (+- oder rote, grüne Schrift)
- gemeinsamer Header (Unterpunkte 2006/2007)
- grau, weiß horizontale Aufmerksamkeit auf Zeile und nicht auf Spalte!!!
Because we don’t want to suggest that the names of the months or the totals are more important than the other data, I’ve used a subtle fill color.
- Störend dass zuerst 2007 dann 2006 – um drehen zuerst 2006 und dann 2007 (chronologische Reihenfolge) – Lesefluss von links nach rechts
chronological order of dates and times.
- Zahlen rechtsbündig, mit , für Tausenderstellen bzw. gleiche Anzahl an Nachkommastellen
- Highlights setzen? Mit Zellenhintergrundfarbe oder mit Schriftfarbe
References
- [Few, 2004]:Stephen Few, Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten, Analytics Press, 2004, Chapter 8 - Table Design.
- [Wallace, 2004]: Rosa Wallace, Designing Tables, NC State University LabWrite Resources, 2004. http://www.ncsu.edu/labwrite/res/gh/gh-tables.html