If there’s one person who I consider to be an expert on data visualization, it would be Edward Tufte. I’m pretty sure I’ve referenced him here before, but for those who haven’t heard of him Tufte quite literally wrote the book on The Visual Display of Quatitative Information. In this book he coins the term chartjunk to refer to visualizations with unnecessary elements of decoration that add zero value; i.e., ornamentation that conveys no additional information. In fact, in some cases chartjunk actually provides negative value, actively distorting the data and making it harder to interpret (sometimes accidentally, sometimes intentionally).
couple of examples I stumbled upon recently in the hopes that after reading this post you’ll be on the lookout for chartjunk, too.
Beyond Meat is an organization whose mission is “to create The Future of Protein® by offering mass-market solutions that perfectly replace animal protein with plant protein.” I love me some animal protein, but I’m not here to riff on their mission. I believe that they believe they are making the world a better place, and so far as I know they’re not hurting anyone. Nobody is coming to take my ham sandwich away and replace it with a kale smoothie…so be it.
Let’s take a peek, shall we?
In the category of “Improving Animal Welfare” they’ve got this little guy:
Now, this isn’t actually egregious. It’s not misleading and only minimally distracting. That said, it’s a donut chart representing exactly one number, which begs the question: why have a chart at all? What is the value in having a green ring? Well, I suppose you could make the argument that it makes sense in the greater context of the About page overall; there are four charts…maybe the designer wanted to keep a consistent aesthetic for each of the data points being presented. Fair nuff.
Moving on, let’s take a look at what they’re doing in the space of “Improving Human Health”:
Oh. Oh chile. Here we’ve got something else entirely. First off, again, we’re only talking about 2 numbers here (that have been squashed into one number… more on that later), so why have a chart at all? Why not just give the numbers? Digging a little deeper, take a close look at the colors. You might’ve noticed that the foreground color - the bright one, the one that catches the eye - takes up the majority of the donut chart. The background color is the one they selected to actually represent the “37%” that they’re talking about. There’s a notch in the upper righthand quadrant - presumably to delineate between the “16%” and “21%” that they’re combining - but at a glance that’s not even going to register. What going to register at a glance: “They’ve got the biggest is piece of the pie”. We could give the benefit of the doubt and chalk this up to a bad design decision, but this is getting dangerously close to the territory of presenting the data in a way that is intentionally misleading.
Even more fundamental than that: look at the numbers they’re combining to come up with 37%. I’m reasonably good at arithmetic. I understand that 16+21=37. …but…are they adding cancer risk to heart disease risk? Can they do that? What the sum of cancer and heart disease? What does it even is mean? Hell, why not throw in the 66 billion from before? Think of the potential Vision statement! “Making the world sixty-six-billion and thirty-seven percent Moar.”
Breathtaking.