

Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS - AndrewDucker
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2749982.html

======
keithpeter
Can anyone explain the advantage of the original graphic over a nicely
captioned _table_ of data?

Mind you, this is a good statistics lesson. My teenage students might get
quite interested in a 'discussion' of the relative merits of various kinds of
phone, before representing the data and then comparing it to UK.

    
    
        US Mobile phone market share by OS and maker
    
        Android      51%
           Samsung   17%
           HTC       14%
           Motorola  11%
           Other      9%
       iOS (Apple)   34%
       Blackberry     9%
       Windows Mobile 3%
           HTC        2.9%
           Palm       0.1%
           Other      0.2%
       Windows 7      1.3%
           HTC        0.5%
           Samsung    0.5%
           Nokia      0.3%
       Symbian        0.9%
       WebOS          0.6%
    

Above needs a clearer indication that the OS percentages are totals, and then
split by manufacturer. I might try a two entry table so you could get market
share by manufacturer or by OS, but then quite a few are single OS
manufacturers.

I find the rounding of the larger market shares to nearest percent a bit
worrying given that Palm is being listed as a discrete total. The 'rounding
error' on Apple's % could be bigger than HTC/Windows 7 for instance

~~~
Terretta
In Europe, set theory is taught early on. In the US where it is not, the
average person seems challenged to quickly visualize the relative significance
of sets and subsets of numbers from a table.

In any case, I think the correctly drawn rectangular chart conveys the
significance in a single holistic glance, while the table above requires quite
a few "memory registers" for comparing the sets and their parts.

~~~
keithpeter
Alas, set theory and the Venn diagram approach has been off the UK syllabus
for some time as well as in the US.

I take your point about the correctly drawn/direct proportion version of the
graphic being more quickly assimilated. I just think that with such a 'dynamic
range' of data (0.1% compared with 0.2% in one category compared with 17% vs
14% in another) any kind of graphic will require very high resolution to
convey the overall picture. I suspect that may have been the reason for the
non-proportionality in the original Nielsen graphic.

------
flyosity
The original person who noticed this was a writer from 9to5mac and he made his
own more accurate graphic a few days before this post was written.
[http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-
their...](http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their-
graphics/)

~~~
latch
and I was having a hard time telling what % HTC for WinPhone 7 had in the OP.

Again, this version might be proportionally more accurate, but it drastically
reduces the amount of information. Nielsen's is the best so far, by far.

~~~
chris_wot
Hardly! The point of the graph is to show _at a glance_ who has the most
market share. Neilsen's graph doesn't do that at all.

If the problem is not showing all the information, then find a totally
different type of graph. Or put them into multiple graphs, one showing the 4
biggest players, then an "other" segment. Then show another graph of the
"Other" segment and show the proportions in that graph.

~~~
klawed
Agreed. The "manufacturer" dimension given that 4 of the 7 OS's only have a
single manufacture. Pull out the manufacturer data, size the blocks properly
and you have a very informative chart.

------
simonh
Maybe they hired whoever does the Fox News info graphics.

[http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/12/12/today-in-
dishonest-f...](http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/12/12/today-in-dishonest-
fox-news-charts/185162)

------
kwekly
That is incredible -- I'm pretty sure a professional statistical research
organisation appreciates power of manipulation of humans through visual
effect.

If they pull the line that it was a mistake on the artistic front to get the
text to fit into the boxes, I'll file that under criminal neglect.

------
qxcv
This looks suspiciously like logarithmic scaling which, as XKCD readers will
attest, is a pretty typical technique for representing statistics which have
differences measured in orders-of-magnitude. I'm not sure what all the panic
on here is for, it's not as if Nielson _only_ bumped Nokia, RIM and
Microsoft's column widths.

~~~
wisty
Why use a logarithmic scaling for an area chart? Given the data it's
presenting, a logarithmic chart is completely inappropriate. If I take the
rectangle of "HTC / Android" and add it to the rectangle of "HTC / Windows",
what do I get?

~~~
Dylan16807
If it was proportional you wouldn't be able to read the windows label in the
first place. I like this setup. Works as well here as it does in disk manager,
the first example I can think of commonly visiting with log scaled area.

------
AndrewDucker
Apologies for the fact that the legend on the second photo isn't as legible as
it could be. My fault for resizing it to the same size as the original Nielsen
image for easy comparison.

I've now updated it so that you can click through to a larger version of the
image.

Also, since Livejournal seems to be having a go-slow, here's a link to the two
images:

<http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb317/AndrewDucker/12.png>

<http://www.richardclegg.org/graphics/phoneshare.png>

<http://www.richardclegg.org/graphics/phoneshare.pdf> (less jaggy)

And here is 9to5Mac with an even better one:

[http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-
their...](http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their-
graphics/)

~~~
chris_wot
Yow! Can you do something about those fonts? So many jaggies... can barely
read them :(

 _Update:_ any chance you could get _two_ graphs made up? The first only
showing the biggest six players, and an "Other" that is the rest of the market
share, and then another which then takes the "Other" results and plots the
market share again in a totally seperate graph?

------
mattmalin
I also found the inaccuracy of the chart awful and looked into producing a
correctly scaled version:

<http://i.imgur.com/8wgAk.png>

The main problem was being able to still display readable text, which should
lead to using another way of visualising the data instead of leading to using
an incorrect graphic.

I also looked into using a stacked bar chart to display the information, more
information (and code for generating plot, though I didn't put too much time
into making it look pretty) here:
[http://www.actuarially.co.uk/post/27156208823/smartphone-
ope...](http://www.actuarially.co.uk/post/27156208823/smartphone-operating-
system-share-mosaic-plot)

------
jezclaremurugan
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. -
Hanlon's razor

~~~
diminish
Stupidity is the ultimate malice.

~~~
Karunamon
Such a cop out.

------
alan_cx
I would suggest that they are using the wrong type of diagram to represent the
data that they have. Clearly its messed up because of labelling. If the data
is such that labelling causes misrepresentation, it has to be the wrong
diagram.

The whole point of these diagrams is that one can look at it and immediately
get a feel for the proportions dictated by the data. If is look like a third,
it should be a third. If you have to change that, then its the wrong diagram.
Or a deliberate attempt to misrepresent.

I'm betting that some one wanted to use the new funky type of diagram because
its new and funky, instead of an appropriate one.

------
bborud
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor>

------
jjdigitized
Quite staggering when the proportions are corrected in the diagram.

------
Foomandoonian
I found it odd that there were no comments on the original Nielsen blog post —
<http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=32494> — so I left one politely
pointing out the inaccuracies. It's being held in moderation. I doubt it'll
ever see the light.

~~~
Foomandoonian
24 hours later, and I think it's pretty clear that Nielsen aren't accepting
any comments on that article.

~~~
Foomandoonian
To my surprise, Nielsen have (after a delay) published all comments AND fixed
the graphic.

> Update 7/16: The original graphic in this post included a chart depicting
> U.S. smartphone manufacturer share which did not scale proportionately.
> While all data points in the original post and graphic remain accurate, the
> post has since been updated with a correctly scaled image.

------
aneth4
This is just generally a horrible way to make a chart that is intended to
communicate relative size - it's worse than a pie chart because visually it's
much harder to compare sizes of horizontal and vertical rectangles.

To compound that by appearing to have proportional sizes, but being completely
wrong, is humorously incompetent. Reminds me of those joke maps showing NYC as
dominating the US.

~~~
Terretta
> _it's worse than a pie chart because visually it's much harder to compare
> sizes of horizontal and vertical rectangles_

Research I've seen suggests the exact opposite -- that people are great at
estimating area of rectangles, and terrible at estimating area of circular or
triangular shapes. They know which circle is bigger, but don't have any idea
by _how much_ bigger.

That said, pie chart slices work for simple data not because of _area_ , but
because all you have to compare is the simple length of the circumference
segments. That's a single dimension, and easy to compare.

See "Pizzas: or Square? Psychophysical Biases in Area Comparisons",
[http://groups.haas.berkeley.edu/marketing/PAPERS/PRIYA/p5.pd...](http://groups.haas.berkeley.edu/marketing/PAPERS/PRIYA/p5.pdf)
for how people lean on a single dimension for size or area comparisons.

Unfortunately, as this cell phone OS chart is trying to support comparison of
multiple sets and subsets, circumference segments alone are inadequate to
convey the relative sizes of the sets.

The more complex the information, the more the usefulness of the nested
rectangles versus pie chart slices becomes clear. Imagine for example a visual
representation of drive space usage by directory and subdirectory.

Here is a drive space chart using nested rectangles:

[http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ScreenShots/1_0-Folde...](http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ScreenShots/1_0-FoldersBujumbura.png)

For comparison, here is an attempt do do the same using pie charts:

<http://www.daisydiskapp.com/img/d4.png>

In fact, if you use both apps, you'll see DaisyDisk is not able to give you
the "grand perspective" in a single view, it requires clicking to zoom in on a
slice it then expands to a full pie to drill down.

~~~
ameasure
If you're interested in comparing the various market shares, a simple bar
chart is much easier to understand, just look at which one is taller.

With these rectangle/tree map things, I never know what to think: well this
one is wider, but this other one is taller; you have to do multiplication just
to compare 2 market shares.

~~~
Terretta
This diagram is a collection of bar charts. One bar chart running
horizontally, showing OS, the other bar chart(s) vertical, showing
manufacturers within an OS. It could be disassembled, certainly, but then
doesn't as readily show the sets and subsets of who has how much relative
share of the whole.

------
Foomandoonian
This story used to be called 'Why is Nielsen misrepresenting smartphone market
share?' I thought that was a brilliant headline, and it made me jump into the
conversation here. I doubt the new title, 'Lying with pictures: Smartphone
manufacturer share by OS', would have caught my eye.

Why do the titles on HN keep getting neutered?

~~~
janardanyri
Headline cleverness is a zero sum game. I'd rather have drier titles instead
of a psychological hacking competition, and scan for content quality (as
loosely indicated by upvotes) and subject relevancy.

~~~
Foomandoonian
Hm, one of us doesn't have a good grasp of what 'zero-sum game' means. In
truth, it may be me, because you lost me there.

I wasn't praising the headline because it was 'clever' though. I think the
question it raised highlighted a bigger issue that still hasn't really been
examined. People are focusing on the importance (or not) of accurate charts.
I'm more interested in understanding why a company that exists to provide a
'complete understanding of what consumers watch and buy' is misrepresenting
data.

------
einhverfr
Why? Because if you make them perfectly proportional, the labels are hard to
read. ;-)

For example, try actually making sense out of the second diagram on that site.
It's far harder to read than the first. You can actually only make sense of it
by cross-referencing with the first diagram.

~~~
Havoc
So now its misleading...but thats OK because at least one can read it?!?

What kind of logic is that?

~~~
einhverfr
All kinds of graphs are misleading if we expect them to be visually perfect.
If you look at <http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb> for example, their graph goes
from about 30 to about 31, so if you read it the same way you might think
Facebook stock has been almost to 0 a bunch....

The question IMO is not whether it is visually misleading but whether it
conveys information in a usable form, and whether the information it conveys
in that form is misleading, and I don't see it.

If we adopt a visually perfect line doesn't that mean all graphs must be
linear (no plotting on non-linear scales, even though this is useful in some
contexts), start with an origin of (0,0) and so forth? What percentage of
graphs do you see that obey these rules?

~~~
route66
One-0eyed person here. Let me help you out.

The Nielsen graph clearly represents 51% Android as about 33%, apple's 34% as
one quarter and the Blackberry als one-fifth. If you prefer readability of the
labels over more-or-less-correctness of a graph which suggests it covers a
full 100% and it's subdivisions you should maybe just use a table. As in
Excel. A 30-31 x-scale is misleadin but showing 10% as 20% though is more than
sloppy because you _do show_ the "origin". This has got nothing to do with
visually perfect.

------
Kilimanjaro
A simpler graphic:

    
    
        One in three smartphones is an iPhone.

------
joe-mccann
This is precisely why I wrote this article on why ecosystems are what's
important -- not a fancy new handset. Nokia and RIM are near almost certain
death in the next 18-24 months.

<http://subprint.com/blog/its-the-ecosystem,-stupid>

------
neeleshs
Is there a cached version somewhere? nginx is 404'ing this page now

~~~
Tobu
The entire journal seems to have disappeared. The post was originally on
Dreamwidth, where you can still read it:
<http://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/2727548.html>

------
thefox
404\. <http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/> also returns a 404 side.

------
mkaltenecker
It’s quite astonishing that so many people here prefer readability over
correctness. What is wrong with you? Readability is optional. Correctness is
not.

That’s obviously the wrong tradeoff. Never outright manipulate your data to
make it more readable! If you can’t make your data readable enough without
manipulating it you just can’t present your data that way. Period. Find a
better way.

(I do not think there is any malice involved, though. Just pure stupidity. I
mean, look at the amount of people around here arguing for readability over
correctness. If they are out here, some are also working for Nielsen.)

~~~
SteveJS
It's a log scale. The bottom axis should use tick marks to make it is obvious.
A poorly marked log scale is certainly something to fix. It's not the same as
fudging the data.

[edit: If you wish to say a log scale is inherently misleading in this context
... go for it. That's different then saying the data is manipulated.]

[Edit2: The area is not meaningful. The widths are meaningful if there is a
total ordering and the scale is labeled. ... I do however agree I am probably
way overestimating how obvious a [log(1+cumulative percentile),log(1)] mapped
to the xaxis is. Also the chart does scream compare areas, and those are
strictly meaningless unless comparing within the same OS.]

~~~
AshleysBrain
Since when is a log scale used for market share? Ever seen a log scale of
browser usage?

~~~
pohl
_Since when is a log scale used for market share?_

At least since the appearance of data sets that lent themselves towards such
visualization. For example, how better to compare the growth of various
platforms, from TRS-80 days to the iPad while the entire industry grows
exponentially?

[http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/17/the-rise-and-fall-of-
person...](http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/17/the-rise-and-fall-of-personal-
computing/)

 _Edit: But I guess that's really market magnitude over time, not quite what
you asked._

------
Toshio
Hey Nielsen, we don't care who's paying you, windowsphone will NEVER be the
third ecosystem.

------
latch
I prefer Nielsen's version by a wide margin. You can make your graph as
perfect as you want, but that doesn't make it better or more useful. After 2
minutes I still can't tell what % HTC WinPhone 7 has...

