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“Pretty But Useless” Visuals

I continue my dashboard visualization series with a bit of an extended rant:

The best use of a pie chart is to show a simple share of a static total.  Here, we can see that Daredevil has almost half of the critics’ reviews, and that The Punisher and Jessica Jones are split.

This simple pie chart also shows some of the problems of pie charts.  The biggest issue is that people have trouble with angle, making it hard to distinguish relative slices.  For example, is Jessica Jones’s slice larger or is The Punisher’s?  It’s really hard to tell in this case, and if that difference is significant, you’re making life harder for your viewers.

Second, as slice percentages get smaller, it becomes harder to differentiate slices.  In this case, we can see all three pretty clearly, but if we start getting 1% or 2% slices, they end up as slivers on the pie, making it hard to distinguish one slice from another.

Third, pie charts usually require one color per slice.  This can lead to an explosion of color usage.  Aside from potential risks of using colors which in concert are not CVD-friendly, adding all of these colors has yet another unintended consequence.  If you use the same color in two different pie charts to mean different things, you can confuse people, as they will associate color with some category, and so if they see the same color twice, they will implicitly assign both things the same category.  That leads to confusion.  Yes, careful reading of your legend dissuades people of that notion, but by the time they see the legend, they’ve already implicitly mapped out what this color represents.

Fourth, pie charts often require legends, which increases eye scanning.

Click through to read me complain about other types of visuals, too.