Good data, great dashboards
Are you seeing the value in your data?
In this series the team at White Box takes a look at visualisation best practice, covering all manner of dashboarding techniques to optimise your reporting tools.
Want to see more tips? Check them out here.
Poor old pie charts, they get such a bad rap.
The problem according to experts is that the human mind struggles to distinguish between the slice-shaped segments, all curves and curious angles; we’re much better at quickly discerning differences in nice straight-edged rectangular shapes.
And it doesn’t take much to make the point, as these images instantly show.
First, a clutch of pies of which you’d be hard-pressed to nominate the biggest slice in any of them.
[Source: https://www.data-to-viz.com/caveat/pie.html]
Now the same in bars, and the relative magnitudes are plain as day.
On a practical level pies are also a handful, with the circular shape often being tricky to place, and labels frequently overlapping or facing omission.
All that said, there’s a scenario where the pie holds its own, and that is where a binary categorisation is under the microscope. In this case, even a subtle diversion from a 50/50 split is evident at a glance, and is particularly effective where a number of binary splits are placed alongside each other, creating a grid of yes/no, on/off, blue/green, etc.
As a bonus, because of the minimal categories labelling is rarely problematic.
For whatever reason, the pie’s delicious cousin – the donut – is less maligned. It is certainly the more aesthetically pleasing option, and the vacant centre is also an opportunity for a supporting measure.
So don’t be ashamed and give the poor pie (well, donut) a break. For binary comparisons, it does the job just fine.
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