We use live monitoring of our website pages, and of our website components, to find performance problems in our application. This means we know why our web application is slow as soon as anything breaches a threshold. Very often, we find something that is draining too much CPU from our servers. Brains are a bit […]
This example is based on an article posted yesterday on the Google Testing Blog, a very interesting article but with one mistake. No Yes Notes I have had to estimate the true values of the three items with no value label The most likely question the chart will be answering is “what are the most […]
It has been a while hasn’t it. However, it is sometimes a good thing to remind ourselves of why pie charts are best avoided. This particular example came from a great blog post. The chart describes version adoption for a particular piece of software. Despite the pie chart not following any of the best practices […]
I recently received this interesting question through the contact form. I always relish an opportunity to challenge my assumptions and opinions on pie charts – even though I appear to be a bit of a zealot. One day, I may even be convinced that I am wrong. Here’s the question: “It seems to me that […]
I haven’t mentioned pie charts for a while, but Lloyds Bank have plastered this advert everywhere with their CD-shaped (or Leggera style) pie chart and it is worth pointing out how rubbish it is. Even if it wasn’t a true fact that pie charts are never the right chart to display your data, they haven’t […]
Percentages can be absolutely brilliant. They can remove a ton of distractions and questions and give you a strong indication of some numbers. For example, it is handy to know that 30% of your visitors are browsing using Internet Explorer and 4% are using Opera. This is probably easier to grasp as a percentage rather […]
I received a message from Kester Takayama, which was a well written note in defence of the pie chart. Kester correctly notes that adding the third-place party to the first-place or second-place party doesn’t in itself create a government because they still may not have an overall majority. He also correctly pointed out that while […]
Before we get started I just wanted to confirm that I do not go out in search of bad charts on The Web. In all the cases where I highlight the problems of a given chart, they have come to me as part of daily life. Because of this, they sometimes appear on a website […]
How long has it been since I last spotted a rubbish pie chart. Okay, I admit it – it was last month. It is actually quite easy to spot them because actually all pie charts are awful. So why is this one so bad? Simple. A two-dimensional pie chart has been proven to be hard […]
My views on pie charts are well known, but that isn’t to say that all other charts are good. The problem with pie charts is that they make it hard to understand information, but with many other charts, the problem is how people use sneaky tricks to deceive you. Whether it is a strange use […]