Two of my recent blog posts critiqued the data visualizations of David McCandless and found them wanting. In those posts I repeated an argument that I’ve been making for some time now: quantitative data can be displayed in ways that are both beautiful (to produce “awe”) and functional (to produce “ah-ha”), without compromising either. In situations when the attention of people must first be captured before their minds can be informed, this can and should be done in a way that maintains the integrity of the information. The attention-getting component of the story need not be the chart that presents the data, but something complementary, such as a photo, diagram, or some other image—perhaps even words—that appeal to the eye or heart. If a quantitative chart is used to grab attention, it can serve a limited communication function as an introduction to the story or overview of the data, and serve as a launch-pad to other charts that are richer in information. I’d like to illustrate this with a beautiful example.
On the website of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) you can explore how the 34 member countries compare to one another across 11 measures that contribute to the quality of life using an interactive infographic called the Better Life Index. Here’s what you see upon arrival:
Be sure to view the larger interactive version of this chart to appreciate its elegance and explore its story. It is immediately engaging aesthetically and informatively. The flowers, one for each country, form glyphs: graphical objects that represent multiple data variables. Each petal represents a different quality-of-life measure: the longer the petal the higher the value. Glyphs don’t provide a way to compare the better life profiles of these countries precisely (we’ll get to that later), but they provide an informative overview. It is easy to spot the country that has the shortest petals overall: Turkey. It is easy to find countries that primarily have long petals and thus high values across all measures of a better life. It is easy to spot countries with a significant imbalance of some long and some short petals, such as Spain. Details such as the fact that Austria rates much lower in one area compared to others are also easy to spot. A great deal of information can be gleaned from this overview.
If it stood alone, the ability of this infographic to inform would be limited in a way that I would find annoying, but it doesn’t stand alone. What is that one value in Austria that is much lower than the rest? With some effort we could figure it out from the color legend, but a better way is readily available. While hovering over Austria with my mouse, the following view pops up:
That smaller value is “Income.” With this simple horizontal bar graph, which is readily available in the moment that we need it, we can compare each measure of life in Austria with greater ease and precision by relying on visual perception’s exceptional ability to compare the lengths of objects that share a common baseline. The initial flower chart does not attempt to tell all parts of the story. In fact, each aspect of the story that comes to mind as potentially interesting is supported by a different visualization that is designed to present it clearly and accurately.
As a citizen of the United States, I was interested in seeing how our quality of life here compares to other OECD countries. By clicking on the flower that represents the United States, I was able to view this information as follows:
On the left, words are used to provide the narrative, while on the right a visual display makes it easy to see how the United States compares to the other countries at a glance. The series of small vertical bars next to each label (Housing, Income, etc.) represents in miniature the values associated with each country ranked from lowest to highest, with the highlighted bar representing the United States. These tiny graphs tell a rich story in little space. Consider Safety for a moment. Not only can we quickly see that the United States is near the bottom with a score of 7.6 out of 10, but that most countries score within a narrow range, with two significant exceptions represented by the lowest bars on the left. Scanning the various measures, I quickly spot that our highest score relative to the other countries is Income (ranked second), but the score of 6.5 is much lower than the highest country. By hovering over the tallest bar a pop-up display tells me that Luxembourg leads the pack with a perfect Income score of 10.
My next question was “How do we compare to Luxembourg overall?” By selecting Luxembourg from the “Compare to…” drop-down list below the charts I was able to make this comparison with ease using the view below with Luxembourg’s bars highlighted but dimmer than those of the United States.
If governance and education in Luxembourg scored more highly, I might be tempted to move.
Much more information about the United States appears on this screen, which I haven’t shown you, including links to related news stories and separate sections of detail about each measure, both in words and charts, those below:
I’ll show just one more aspect of this rich story, then leave it to you to enjoy and learn from it on your own.
One of the key purposes of this infographic is to let us assign weights to the various measures of a better life to fit our own preferences and then see which countries offer the life that we seek. I weighted the measure arbitrarily and was shown the following view:
Weights are assigned by selecting from one to five dots to the right of each measure in the “Create Your Better Life Index.” Based on the weights that I assigned, the flower visualization now shows each country’s correlation to my preferences based on the vertical position of each (higher is better). I can make the comparison even easier by switching the sort order from alphabetically to ranked by score from lowest to highest.
I hope you can see from this brief description that the designers of this infographic achieved a marriage of form and function, beauty and usability, that did not subsume one to the other in an unequal partnership as many infographics do. It was designed and developed by Moritz Stefaner, Jonas Leist and Timm Kekeritz. I don’t know these fellows and know almost nothing about their other work, so I cannot vouch for its merits, but this one example speaks highly of their abilities and their respect for information. If you check on the background of Moritz Stefaner, you’ll find that he has a B.S. in Cognitive Science and an M.A. in Interface Design. His background provides an understanding of the human brain, which clearly directs him to display data in ways that our eyes can perceive and brains can comprehend with ease, speed, and accuracy. The other designers also have backgrounds that make them sensitive to issues of usability. They didn’t just make an infographic that was pretty and provided a little information in a semi-effective way. They could have made the flower petals spin around, but they knew better. Infographics don’t need to shout to get noticed; a welcoming smile and the promise of intelligent conversation is all they need. These guys created a piece of work that is beautiful, engaging, simple, easy to use, easy to understand, accurate, and deeply informative.
Work of this type differs from day-to-day examples of data visualization in two ways:
- It requires a great deal of graphical design expertise
- It requires a great deal of time
The Better Life Index was not produced in an hour or even a day. I’m sure that a great many hours of work went into its design and development. Only special circumstances warrant this amount of work and the resulting expense. When a story is important to a large number of people, it makes sense to invest this level of time and effort. Most uses of data visualization, however, feature information and insights that are important to relatively few people. We can’t afford several days of effort to produce them. We need skills and tools to produce them quickly and easily. We want them to be well designed—pleasing to the eye—but not necessarily beautiful.