Wednesday, April 06, 2005



They found it. It took them at least 4 hours to find that and correct it (a collegue of mine found it around 15:00, I checked around 19:00 it was still the wrong version...). And still this graphic is crap. You do not get any more information from the graphic than you would have got from the table. You have always to go back and forth between table and graphic to figure out which coulor is which party. Can you tell if the light green section is bigger than the pink one? If yes, by how much? You cannot think about the data from the graph alone, you need a table beside it. If you have a table, you don't need the graph, as it does not enlighten you in any way. It is just a blob of colour on the page. And if you need a blob of coulor, than just put up an ad, at least you get money for it.

A table would have presented the same information in an as easy way, you can easily tell that 49.6% is something like a bit less than half of the whole (which, by the way, you cannot tell from the graph). OK, this argument is a bit flawed, as it took Spiegel more than 4 hours to find the error...

Chartjunk.

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