Teaching:TUW - UE InfoVis WS 2009/10 - Gruppe 13 - Aufgabe 3

Aufgabenstellung

If you are not familiar with those kinds of diagrams, they are a little hard to read at a first glance. It took me a few minutes until I understood, that "Total" is a company. Therefore the graphic made no sense at first. Of course, if you have the graphics embedded in an article this mistake would not happen at all.

The y-axes shows the growth rate of the companies. This is quite easy to understand. What could be a little irritating are the circles that represent the total production of the year. It may look like the circles are related to values of the y-axes, but they absolutely not.

Also only the size of the circles and the growth rate (location on the y-axes and numbered value) doesen't really give you a hint, how the amount of production was in 2002. You can use the size of the circles to compare this years production of every company, but it also would be interesting if you could compare the amount of oil production for the companies itself without having to set the position of the y-axes in relation to the size of the cirlce. That would be easy if you have a second circle for each company in the background in another color. Of course that wouldn't give you more information (cuase this information is already represented throught the position of the y-axes) but it would give you a much easier way to compare the amounts of the companies own production. So you would have the size of the circles, that shows you the production amount, the second circle in the back, that gives you an idea how the production amount of each company has changed and the position on the diagram which makes it easy to compare the growth rates of the companies.