Teaching:TUW - UE InfoVis WS 2008/09 - Gruppe 09 - Aufgabe 3

Aufgabenstellung

Beschreibung der Aufgabe 3

Zu beurteilende Grafik

Biggest Drips: Annual abstraction of treshwater resources

Critics on the Graphics

• Headline

(Bad) formatted headline leads to slow comprehension.

"Biggest Drips" is completely unnecessary since it is no essential information.

"Annual abstractions of freshwater resources" is not a good choice for a short description of the graphics.

• Sub-headline

Sub-headline contains two different units. They could be merged.

"Mid-90's" is no exact year and looks like bad research of data.

"Thousands of cubic meters per person" is a quite long description. Could be abbreviated (1,000m³) or the unit of data could be changed to cubic meters (m³).

• Ink

The data-ink ration is very bad - there is much ink but little data.

The graphics contain too much ink in general.

Unimportant things are much more emphasized (p.e. colors) than important data.

The background is filled with (too much and same) ink, for example gridlines, shades, little waves in the water. Could all be omitted.

Colors are not used well in general. Important data (numbers) are in white which is the least "powerful" color.

There are too many different colors used, this is not useful because it distracts the viewer.

Raindrops show proportions but overload the graphics, especially image number four.

• Font-Size

Graphics just use one font-size/-style for all text.

• Scale of number

The scale of numbers seems not well chosen. The page numbers at the bottom habe the same font-size.

• Page numbers

The numbers of the pages as well as the "back" and "next" buttons are much too big (font-size is the same as the important data).

• Pages

The table is divided into 4 different pages which leads to bad readability and comparability. Data should be merged into one table.

• Highlighting

OECD average is not highlighted although is not a country (as other data).

Optimized Graphics

Improvements

• New Design

More details

References

• [Few, 2004a]:Stephen Few, Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten, Analytics Press, 2004, Chapter 7 - General Design for Communication.

• [Few, 2004b]:Stephen Few, Elegance Through Simplicity, intelligent enterprise, Oct 16, 2004.

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=N2ATDQWY5VYKSQSNDBGCKHSCJUMEKJVN?articleID=49400920

• [Tufte, 1999]:Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Stanford, January 26, 1999.

http://ldt.stanford.edu/ldt1999/Students/mizuno/Portfolio/Work/reports/tufte/ed229c-tufte-outline.html

Links

• InfoVis:Wiki UE Homepage

• UE InfoVis

• Gruppe 09