#Summary
The use cases for less common graphs is a blog article authored authored by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. The article portrays examples of uncommon vis idioms. The motivation for the post actually arose from the author writing about idioms she most often used in practice. She noticed most of these were common idioms, like scatterplots or horizontal bar graphs. Because of this the author proposes situations when the use of uncommon idioms is appropriate via four examples (three effective use cases and an ineffective one).
The first example is an infographic that plots California moisture data. The idiom resembles a scatterplot but focuses on outliers by fading the middle portions of the plot and focuses on trends by plotting trend lines in the faded portion of the plot. It winds up effectively summarizing what would appear like an overwhelming amount of information under different circumstances.
The second example shows effective use of horizon graphs with food pricing trends. Given a small learning curve a ton of information can be packed and summarized into the tiniest space.
The third example is a type of parallel coordinates idiom by K. Szucs on profitable Hollywood movies. It is another example of small learning curve to high effectiveness payoff. (This was my favorite of the three. It really is worth a look!)
The last example shows ineffective use of spider graphs. The author mentions how she always had to explain how to interpret these graphs, and even made a graph for how to interpret the graphs. Spider charts involve comparison of radial distances and area measurements which can be hard to judge when relating attributes to one another.
####Key Points
- Common idioms are used because the lack of a learning curve increases information delivery effectiveness.
- Uncommon idioms carry a learning curve price.
- Uncommon idioms have a use, when creativity doesn't jeopardize effectiveness.
- You will notice effective use if the learning curve is short (or the uncommon idiom "self-handles" the learning process) and your attention is captured.
- The main point is that uncommon idioms carry a "small learning curve price to high effectiveness payoff", but good ones somewhat naturally handle this price.