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Showing posts from November, 2022

Pie Charts - Just Say No

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For those who have known me for a while, my antipathy towards pie-charts (and donut charts!) should be nothing new FWIW, it’s not something off the cuff - pie-charts are,  almost always  better off being replaced by something different (bar graphs being the obvious replacement). Why? Because Quantity is represented by angles and humans are   VERY   bad at identifying differences in angles (87 °   vs 82 ° ? Labeling slices ends up confusing stuff even more Small percentages (which might be important) get goofy Anything above 2-3 items in the pie chart are crazy difficult to figure out Don’t get me started on donut charts, that just take all of the above, and make it Even harder to deal with And it’s not just me, Stephen Few ( Perceptual Edg e. Think “grandmaster of all things Visualizaion”. Hell, he, literally, invented the  bullet graph …) wrote the definitive “ DO NOT USE PIE CHARTS ” article back in 2007. And yeah, if you don’t feel like reading the whole...

The "Show That You're Doing Something" Gambit

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Many many   many   years ago - during the DotCom era - I was at a company that unicorn-ed overnight. Mind you, before the craziness, we were a   tiny  company, a handful of people at that. But then - DotCom bubble, websites, and   BOOM! , we were growing like mad. It was pretty awesome, I have to tell ya 🤗 At the time, I was young, full of beans, and pretty certain that the world revolved around me. And the hyper-growth certainly only served to accentuate this - after all, it was obvious that I had something to do with all of our success, right? Somewhere along the way, we brought in a couple of people who were, well, capable of doing what I was doing. And, what’s worse, they had been doing it for a lot longer, and at a much larger scale, than I was. Thing is, I  knew  that I was better, stronger, faster than them, I just needed some way of showing everybody that I was all that and a bag of chips. And I needed to do it  right damn now  becau...