When designing a chart, most people try to come up with the ‘best way to visualize the data’. This often results in charts that are unobvious or useless to readers, though. Instead, we should try to design charts that best answer a specific question or that best communicate a specific insight about the data, even though such charts don’t answer all questions that readers might have about the data.
Read moreI’ve Stopped Using Box Plots. Should You?
I've recently published an article in the Data Visualization Society's excellent Nightingale publication, entitled "I've Stopped Using Box Plots. Should You?" A brief summary:
After having explained how to read box plots to thousands of workshop participants, I now believe that they’re poorly conceived (box plots, not workshop participants ;-) ), which makes this classic chart type unnecessarily unintuitive, hard to grasp, and prone to misinterpretation. This has caused innumerable distribution-based insights to fail to land with audiences who weren’t willing or able to grasp them. Alternative chart types are virtually always easier to learn how to read, more informative, or both.
Want to read the full, heretical article? It's now available on the Nightingale site.
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