Corona Overviews II

 Corona pandemic unfortunately still exists and European countries encounter a fourth wave of incidences. In February we showed the overview dashboards for covid-19 of two of the major german online journals – www.zeit.de and www.spiegel.de. 

In this contribution we will see how these journals are treating the information visualization during time and whether there are significant changes compared to February.

This is how they looked in the past:

Der Spiegel

Die Zeit 

And this is how they look today:

Der Spiegel

Category details

Die Zeit

Considering some information design aspects we can observe that the Spiegel presentation lost in readability by reducing the overview character and organizing the overall themes in different chapters, whereas the Zeit presentation preserved the overview character by showing all the necessary information on one page. The details can be found on deeper levels. 

Both presentation types could increase better understanding by increasing information density and adding chart tables, period comparisons and variance indicators. 

Category details

A nice visualization

This kind of data visualization should be available for every german city, even for those where there are only busses available....

Data Visualization in Non-Financial Applications I

Data visualization standards like IBCS can also be applied to non-financial applications. Mainly dashboards serve as a way to bring denser amounts of data to the user. In the following examples we can see how an information service provider of the brazilian renewables industry presents his information in an online self-service environment. (https://www.greener.com.br) https://www.greener.com.br/dados-tecnicos-gc/

When working with pie charts information density usually is very low. By adding tables and drill down possibilities we have a slight workaround.

Six charts and some text information and selection bars on the left side are sufficient for granting a good overview. Timely information is presented in vertical bars and structural information in horizontal bars. For good reading numbers are placed directly on the bars. 

Better understanding of the presented information can be substantially increased by adding comparisons and deviations. Highlighting exceptions and comments also favour better reading.

A good dashboard supplies drill-down and look around facilities as shown here.

But due to special selection situations the amount of information shown tends to be poor....

A nice tool for climatic data visualization

Follow the link "earth.nullschool.net" (https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-9.77,19.35,282) and you will find a very interesting app for the worldwide representation of climatic data. Especially when you are interested in the dynamic visualization of such data.

entry screen of the app

by clicking on earth you will get a selection menu for different scenarios

data representation after parameter selection 

detailed weather situation North Atlantic and Europe with low pressure area over Ireland and Great Britain from 2021-05-24 

Charts of the Month

- Saldo direkt als Abweichung oben einbauen

- Piecharts wie immer schwer zu lesen

- mit Abweichungen noch besser

- Angabe des Rests und Summe aller Zweige in Grafik als Zahl

Grafiken aus Berichten vom Institut fuer Mittelstandsforschung in Bonn

Which chart of these 3 do YOU like best?

Which chart of these 3 do YOU like best?

SUCCESS - "Simplify"-Solution

Because the message is, that "there is a forecasted increase of 5 units (+29%) for 2017 because of...."
 

Preparing for a circular economy…..

Annual reports are a very good example for how companies present themselves to the public and future investors. If one would like to give a fast overview and transparent look on a company most would follow the proverb “A picture tells more than thousand words” and use graphical presentation in abundance to give deeper insights for the interested reader. Or in other words inform than entertain, especially in our growing information economy. Thus we could expect annual reports with lots of charts and detailed information. But what we can see over the last years is a revival of textual information and a new puritanism when it comes to graphical presentation. Besides of the low number of charts we can observe mainly three types of charts like circles, columns and lines and as textual type a lot of low-level tables. Especially circles and their subforms like donuts are overwhelmingly used for almost every type of content. Could it be, that better reading and faster understanding (i.e. transparency) isn’t one the principal goals of companies in informing their public?

Basic ingredients for the graphical presentation of information in this annual report. (https://www.huhtamaki.com/en/investors/)

What informs better in the above chart? Donut or bars and lines?

This could serve as good base data for nice time series charts. 

"Big numbers" but few information

The Board consists of seven members

How long will it take for the reader to calculate the variation by segment between 2019 and 2020?

For graphical timely comparisons bar charts are much better.

If packed in one instead of two tables reading and comparisons could be much easier.

"Themes" are about circular economy, but as the graph shows, it's still linear.....