
Design checklist for perfect charts - Dashdevs
https://www.dashdevs.com/blog/design-checklist-for-the-perfect-charts/
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jrd259
See instead

Tufte, Edward: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (and the
followup books)

Few, Stephen: Information Dashboard Design

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patrickcteng
I'd like to add that Wall Street Journal's Guide to Informational Graphics is
a great one too.

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TeMPOraL
Peculiar list. Some points are good (e.g. 6, 7, 8), but overall this list has
a different definition of "perfect" than expected. It's not about designing a
chart that facilitates insight in the best possible way; it's about making a
chart as a vehicle of parting users from their money/time (e.g. 3, 17), with
particular focus on charts in mobile sites/applications.

As per 'jrd259, if you want to design chart that maximizes value provided to
the user, read Tufte instead.

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mathie25
First item of a Design checklist: Don't use pie charts

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bluetidepro
Why?

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mathie25
There are multiples reasons to not use a pie/donut chart as it does not (most
of the time) help to better understand the information presented. Edward Tufte
and Stephen Few (both experts in data visualization) have given multiple
arguments against pie charts. See the link for a good summary on the subject

[https://priceonomics.com/should-you-ever-use-a-pie-
chart/](https://priceonomics.com/should-you-ever-use-a-pie-chart/)

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seanwilson
You'd never use a pie chart? What if it's just more visually pleasing to the
rest of your page design and you only want to convey roughly how say 3 data
values compare in size?

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com2kid
They may be visually pleasing, but humans just cannot process angular
magnitudes at a granular level.

A bar chart where one bar is 25% larger than another is obvious, a pie chart
with the same is not obvious. Numeric labels are needed, because the chart
itself does not serve as a useful visual reference.

It may look nice, but it does no good. Especially once you have more than a
handful of values!

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seanwilson
My point is making sometimes look good or to draw the eye of the user can be a
big enough factor to use a pie chart. Maybe you're only showing two values and
only need to convey if one value is larger or a lot larger than another for
example.

Not every page is a scientific document.

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TeMPOraL
At this point you may as well write it longhand, "X is much larger than Y".
Since promoting anything less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of
sabotage on your fellow human beings, you have to ask yourself _why_ are you
using a pie chart - because it's not to provide value for users.

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seanwilson
That's a really extreme way to interpret what I said.

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doctorpangloss
Here’s the real checklist:

[ ] It is going up and to the right.

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antisthenes
Horrible freezing on Firefox. Please fix your site.

Not sure why it loads the same recaptcha.js file 6 times or what exactly
requires 200kb of CSS here, but there it is.

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alexpetralia
The amount of sarcasm in this thread already is really endearing.

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fifnir
"analitycs" ?

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KineticLensman
"Expences" ?

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_fourzerofour
I think it's safe to say these are concepts best expressed via charts for the
author.

Sarcasm aside, this is a great opportunity to bring up the work of Bret Victor
again. Specifically, pushing the boundaries of how we're communicating
fundamental concepts with intelligent design - it was a real eye opener for me
seeing ideas that were on the verge of nonsensical in a medium (say, English)
expressed effortlessly in another. I know it comes up here often but frankly
it's something that everyone should be aware of.

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devchix
Indeed. I recently learned of his work on HN, and have been carrying his Magic
Ink paper around for 2 weeks, nibbling on it bit by bit. This was written in
2006! I see implementations of the ideas expressed everywhere - for example
Netflix's "Recommended" list. Although, a nit. I once bought a bunch of fairy
tale books on Amazon. For months after that I was recommended nothing but more
fairy tales. It's not counter-intuitive to think that if I bought 10 things of
the same kind, I may not want to buy any more of that thing for a while. I
think the paper called this last-value predictor, and clearly for a subset of
decisions, this predictor is maladaptive.

