Critiquing a Makeover Monday Data Viz

As part of our DS28's week 2 project, we were asked to choose a Makeover Monday dataset and identify the good and the bad.

I chose data on Advertising spending. You can view the original viz yourself here: https://data.world/makeovermonday/2020w46 (NB for licensing issues, I can't post the image here)

I'll start off with the good:

  1. Good choice of chart.
  2. I liked the colours. I thought the choice of colours worked for this chart although if the focus was on internet, maybe they could have just highlighted that particular line.
  3. It really puts the emphasis on the internet dominating ad spend

Next the bad or not so good:

  1. It's not immediately clear that the last 4 data points are dates in the future - they do note it in the axis but this could have been more clear on the chart itself
  2. They've done well to eliminate some of the chart junk such as gridlines but then they've gone and added images. They've also added labels to all the lines which makes things feel quite cramped.
  3. The fluorescent green on the pale background is not the clearest.

Some improvements that I would make:

  1. Remove some of the labels to highlight what lines are of importance to the audience. Also remove the images.
  2. Add a reference line or something else to make it clear that data from 2020 onwards is predictive, not actual data
  3. Potentially you could aggregate the bottom advertising categories and allow the user to click to drilldown into the data
Author:
Jacob Kilroy
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