Everlasting pie chart

Manuel Lima goes into the history of the pie chart, or rather, circle representations in general. Despite many people poo-pooing the chart type over the decades, it keeps hanging around:

We might think of the pie chart as a fairly recent invention, with arguably more flaws than benefits, in regards to the statistical portrayal of data. However, if we look deep into history we realize this popular chart is only a recent manifestation of an ancient visual motif that carried meaning to numerous civilizations over space and time. A graphical construct of radiating lines enclosed by a circle, this motif is also a powerful perceptual recipe. If we look deep into ourselves we uncover a strong proclivity for such a visual pattern, despite the final message it might carry. As one of the oldest archetypes of the circular diagram, the sectioned circle will certainly outlast all of us, and indifferent to criticism, I suspect, so will the pie chart.

Yep.

Lima wrote a whole book on the use of circles in information design, in case you’re feeling yourself drawn to the shape for some unexplained reason.

Tags: , ,

Living room corner pie chart

From reddit user shoru_lannister, here is a pie chart of their living room corner.

Do we have another contender for best pie chart? I think the pyramid pie chart still has an edge.

Tags: , ,

Living room corner pie chart

From reddit user shoru_lannister, here is a pie chart of their living room corner.

Do we have another contender for best pie chart? I think the pyramid pie chart still has an edge.

Tags: , ,

Pie charts are okay

There were some ripples in the space time continuum recently about a pizza and a pie chart. It looked like a pie chart but was actually just a pizza with numbers around it. Those numbers didn’t sum to 100 percent, so there were pitch forks and burning and like I said, ripples in the space time continuum.

Here, have a look for yourself:

It’s social media filler content, so whatever. And yeah, the chart, if you want to call it that, isn’t any good. But let’s not lose sight of the big picture here, and that is that pie charts are okay sometimes.

Plus, we might not even understand how people read pie charts from a perception point of view anyways.

Tags: ,

Square pie chart beats out the rest in perception study

Square pie charts vs regular pies

Many hate pie charts. Others love them. I think they’re useful but have limitations. Most of these are just feelings though, maybe accompanied by an Edward Tufte quote. We need facts. Robert Kosara and Drew Skau provide some in their recent studies on how we read pie charts. There appears to be a good chance people don’t read the things correctly.

But I found Kosara’s follow-up more interesting. He dug up a paper that he and his student Caroline Ziemkiewicz wrote a few years ago on square pie charts. Instead of filling a circle to represent proportion, the square pie chart fills a — wait for it — square.

In terms of reading the actual represented proportion, the square one performed best, against the stacked bar, pie, and donut.

More surprising (to me at least) was that the stacked bar, which represented only two values in the study, performed worst. I know that stacked bars with several values can be tricky, but just two? That’s essentially a progress bar to show that a page is loading. People everywhere are misjudging the time left to load sites in their browsers everywhere. Gasp.

More details.

Tags: ,

Pie chart pyramid

Pie Pyramid

This pyramid pie chart just might take the pie chart humor crown from the amount-of-pie-eaten pie chart. (Who made this?)

Tags: ,