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Basics of current visualization

  • Target Audience: Administrators of a university (I’m making a big assumption here, but need it to evaluate this properly)
  • Exploration or explanation: Exploration
  • Purpose: Highlight the racial distribution of the undergraduate population
  • Story: None (exploration)
  • Idiom: Pie chart
  • Data scale of proportion: Ratio
  • Data scale of race: Nominal

Issues

Bad Idiom Choice

The relative differences between some of the wedges (e.g. 4.53% vs 4.63%) are difficult to visually ascertain with a bar chart because the angles are similar

Suggestion: Use a bar chart instead with labels of each exact percentage. The height levels are easier to visually inspect

Bad channel for wedge color

Currently uses various shades of graded blue (saturation, a magnitude channel) for nominal data (which should use an identity channel)

Suggestion: Use hue (a categorical color scale) instead of saturation.

Bad color scale for wedge color

The gradient makes interpreting the legend difficult.

Suggestion: Use a solid color

Wrong data

“International” is a relative description of country of origin, and not a race

Suggested Viz Mockup