This week, in our Lab to Market intro course, we were reading about creating new market space (as contrasted with capturing a share of an existing market). Buried in one of our articles was a sidebar about Quicken software. The sidebar contained what I immediately identified as the worst graphs in the entire world, reproduced above for your enjoyment. When I showed them to my roommate “Michael,” a Ph.D. candidate in the math department here, he just gripped his head and protested, “Why are they linear?” Michael was not the only one to find fault with the graphs. In class, “Erin” raised her hand and observed that for some x-axis attributes, “high” is good, and for others, “low” is preferable. She went on to point out, “If you have a bunch of data points that are best described through words, you don’t need to put them in a graph. That’s what tables are for.”
Lawn Fawn
My friend Kelly makes cards and started her own craft supply business! Support entrepreneurship in action.
2 Comments
Would have made more sense to put ‘Better’ vs ‘Worse’ instead of ‘High’ or ‘Low’ as Erin pointed out. I guess they use the line-area graph to highly the overall preferability of each tool. ie, if the Y axis were Better vs Worse, then the tool with the most area would be preferred.
Took a bit to get comfortable with that.
Hey Michael, it took me a bit to get comfortable too. In fact, I don’t know if I ever did get comfortable at all. I had to go read a book called “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” afterward just to reassure myself that there is some sanity left in the world.
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