I have to curse the Financial Times once more. That is how you need to show stock quotes:
Here: even more stock quotes with sparklines. And up-to date. Mostly.
Or is anyone interested in the “news” that the last day was up while twenty days before that where down?
I have cancelled all my daily newspapers.
Stock markets are so exciting for the Financial Times Deutschland. Either its all bullish or altogether bearish. Every day anew. Nothing for investors with cardiac insufficiency who happen to miss their glasses.
This is the same level as for the regional newspaper Nürnberger Nachrichten. They have two angles only, too.
For sensitive souls like me an arrow signals a trend. The steeper the more. A trend is easy to calculate and visualize:
* nt = “no trend”
Business charts are losers. Its only good luck if they work at all. He has shown some basic problems of them. With mine here, you need more brains than luck to find the truth.
Each series increases with the same amount per month. The first increases by 5, the second by 25 and the third by 30. All increase with the same relative dynamic. From January to February by 50 %, next months by 33 %, then 25, 20, 17, 14, 13, 11, 10, 9, 8 %.
The eye is sure to see something different. The increase of the bottom most series seems dull compared to the top most. And even a difference in dynamics between the two top most series appears to be plausible.
All wrong.
Sparklines are much better suited. They present the first series as 
65, the second as
325 and the third as 
390. More general: Want to compare different time series? Then scale them individually. It doesn’t work in one single chart.
No rule without an exception. I did find that one through Bill. A climber can use cracks to secure himself. You need a cam of the right size for that. Modern ones are based on eccentric panels and are high-tech.
Does the cam fit the crack? Look at the traffic light color. Green holds, yellow should hold while the next size would be better. Red doesn’t hold.
Climbing is easier than controlling an enterprise.
Rolf had a great idea: A map is easy to understand, because rivers are blue and forest is green. It took a while before everyone acknowledged that.
Maps are understood, if they adhere to the common notation
In business reporting one day values, currencies, periods and variances are graphed this way and that way the other day. Rolf insists that months are less wide than quarters and quarters are less wide than years.
If such a notation is used consistently, graphical elements not only illustrate proportions but reveal additional content at a glance. This is a milestone in advancing communication between controllers and managers.
Speaking of color: For the Chinese red is a sign of good luck, while in the West it is a sign of danger. But that’s a different story.
Labradores like me like to swim. Can be analytically refreshing, too. On that small islet I met two french school girls. They discussed Saturn and the Earth. How large and how small. One of them hinted to a circular pattern on the floor of the islet. “The large circle, that is Saturn”, she started, “the small one is the Earth, how tiny in comparison.” Very clever those two girls. Much more than many information designers.
Back at the beach I drew that for him in the sand. Than he got it, too.
Many concepts feel like “a solution desperately seeking an application“. Sometimes waiting is futile. Square pies are such an issue.
Wired offers a colorful mystery-pie. It argues that household budgets for tech gadgets haven’t changed much in the recent decade. But money is spent for other gadgets nowadays. Square pies don’t help to understand as Anil Dash and Juice Analytics have shown.
I don’t like that Wired inherently focuses on a chronological development, but doesn’t show it.
“High tech gear gets cheaper every year. So we’re spending a lot less on it, right? Um, no. In fact, the proportion of US household budgets spent on tech products and services — computers, game consoles, cell phone service, cable, TVs — has held steady at about 5 percent for most of the past decade. We’re just spending that money — more than we pay for health insurance — on different stuff. For instance, we spend a lot less on TVs (as prices have dropped) but more on cable and satellite services (we need our HBO). Here’s a peek at how our quest to stay wired hits our wallets.”
Source: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/15–08/st_infoporn
The reader has to grasp that a square which is 23.6 % large has only been X large before. Because it has increased by 72 %. Ah. I didn’t get that. So I made up a table:
I think know you see what the important items are, how the structure changed and what is new. The longer I looked at the data the more I wanted to know. Add share of total and accumulated views. Only for 2005.
In the end it was clear: there is a whole lot in that data. You get it with a simple table.
The link in Wired is named “Infoporn”. Correctly.
He has won the Oscar in informatics: the 2007 Innovation Prize of Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) for his work on “Hybrid Data Mining”.
My friend Chiara has sent me a graph about car colors and color as an attribute. From the German newspaper “Nürnberger Nachrichten”. It’s about the temperature dogs have to endure when in summer they have to wait in a car. Definitely too hot. A special case of small multiples. It emphasizes the differences in varnish variants. Sad: the temperature is hard to read. Red needle on a red scale. Tiny marks. Uff. And each gauge uses much too much space. Numbers would’ve been much better. Directly on the varnish.
Colors could have been sorted from left to right according to temperature. White, red, blue. Interesting: the cool blue is much warmer than the hot red. I rate this graph A‑.
Temperature comparison of varnish colors.
Great. German marriages are increasingly stable. Even better: the graph in the German newspaper „Welt am Sonntag (WamS)“. It’s creator also lives in the deaf dog area. That’s where you are immune against any kind of chartjunk. No coloring of areas with confusing legends. No 3D-bars. Neither a church, nor a wedding dress or an attorney’s robe as decoration.
A small dot and a name, Neustrelitz, the only location which is addressed in the accompanying text. Marriages are most stable in Neustrelitz. Only 8.5 divorces per 1000 residents.
All state borders as clear as necessary while as thin as possible. A thin, narrow spaced font for compact labels. Finally, a small visual goody in the headline.
A graph without any chartjunk
Dogs hear quite well. Sometimes they read minds. Some designers think: “What boring numbers. It’s nothing to write home about.” Others believe: “If there is nothing to illustrate, what am I a designer for?” Information designers don’t listen to that. They are deaf when it comes to graphical rubbish, fashionable fuss and decoration. In case the numbers are boring they look for better ones. If there are none, boredom is the message. Not everything is a scandal, a mess or noteworthy. Brilliant information design is apparent in the terrific work of Megan Jaegerman.
An example: next time
Visualization often focuses on changes in shares which are compared to a total. Stacked column graphs which add up to 100 % are a common chart type. But not for more than three shares at once. Readability is becoming too bad. Even three cause problems.
Shares of channels for selling used cars: used car dealers, new car dealers and private
My eye has to grasp the height of the top-most columns from the top down. The columns in the middle are even worse. My eye keeps jumping up and down to grasp their height. The source of the problem: the top line symbolizes 100 %. This is also plain to any reader, if I tell him beforehand that everything adds up to 100 %. Thus, no need to focus the design of the graph on this convention.
Option 1: Columns in a Graphic Table
Option 2: Sparklines in a Graphic Table
Management is difficult. A boss has to have everything under control at the same time. He prefers to have this Everything in best order. But what is best order?
My friend Petra says: if a traffic light is red, you have to stop. She heads a swiss subsidiary of a large pharmaceutical enterprise. And she doesn’t want her crew to stop, if the light says red. She wants them to accelerate. And when the traffic light says green, she wants them to wait and think what could have been done better. Petra doesn’t like traffic lights. She doesn’t like any coding. She prefers to see numbers. Distinct and clear. She’s got Color TV already, at home.
The recent European Union’s summit was exhausting. Not just for politicians but also for information designers. Comparing two measurements is (in some cases) already tempting. Three is even harder. In the discussion about weighing of votes among members of the European Union it’s even been five: population, distribution of votes in the treaty of Nice, in the proposal for a European constitution and in the Polish proposal based on a square root model and finally the number of members in the European Union. The German newspaper “Die Welt” as well as the “FAZ” use graphic tables, the regional paper “Nürnberger Nachrichten” a business chart.
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| Die Welt | FAZ | Nürnberger Nachrichten |
Die Welt is acceptable. However, the light green for the Polish model is hard to read.
The FAZ uses an iterating background. Needless and annoying. Really bad is the label for the Polish model. The lines in the label dominate the bars. The eye compares the lines’ lengths although these have no meaning.
The idea of the Nürnberger Nachrichten is o.k.: you easily distinguish the three distributions. But color is a catastrophe. The bars are flickering before my eyes. That it’s also the color of the German flag is odd. All explicit values are missing and the smaller countries are missing, too.
An alternative is to look at the deviations compared to the current regulation:
Being dogmatic is still my nature. And I continue to hate traffic-light colors. However, I do like the traffic-light elements of Summize. They display product ratings with multi-color bars. In the example 35 products associated with Flipper more often receive a top rating than products which contain the brightest name in the universe.
Even better: the grey-scale variant and sparklines. Sparklines visualize the number of ratings per month. The color represents the mean of all ratings for a month. Distinguishing different values is much easier with the grey-scale variant.
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