The common explanation for how pie charts work is that we read them by angle. That of course would mean that donut charts would be bad, because you can’t see the angle when you take away the center of the pie. Changing the radius of a slice wouldn’t matter though, because that doesn’t change the angle. But there is no evidence that angle is how we read pie charts, quite the opposite actually. In this new video, I walk through five reasons why angle is not how we read pies, and what that means for other things we like to assume about them.
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Can A Timeline Pie Chart Work?
Can you put ranked data into a pie chart that also represents time? This chart tries, and I think it succeeds.
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eagereyesTV Episode 3: 3D Pie Charts For Science!
How do we read pie charts? This seems like a straightforward question to answer, but it turns out that most of what you’ve probably heard is wrong. We don’t actually know whether we use angle, area, or arc length. In a short paper at the VIS conference this week I’m presenting a study I ran to answer this question – a study using 3D pie charts!
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Paper: Evidence for Area as the Primary Visual Cue in Pie Charts
How we read pie charts is still an open question: is it angle? Is it area? Is it arc length? In a study I’m presenting as a short paper at the IEEE VIS conference in Vancouver next week, I tried to tease the visual cues apart – using modeling and 3D pie charts.
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Understanding Pie Charts
Pie charts are extremely common, but people are also commonly mocked for using them. There are many ways to get them wrong, and there are many bad examples out there. But understanding pie charts and how to use them isn’t that difficult, and the research shows that they’re often not a bad choice. [Read more…] about Understanding Pie Charts
Talk: Pie Charts – Unloved, Unstudied, and Misunderstood
I gave a talk at Information+ earlier this year that has now been posted. It’s about pie charts! And it was a fun talk, too. [Read more…] about Talk: Pie Charts – Unloved, Unstudied, and Misunderstood
A Reanalysis of A Study About (Square) Pie Charts from 2009
After my recent posting on the results of our pie charts studies, Jorge Camoes teased me on Twitter about square pie charts. So I dug up the data from a study we ran many years ago to look at how well they compare to bars, pies, and squares. [Read more…] about A Reanalysis of A Study About (Square) Pie Charts from 2009
An Illustrated Tour of the Pie Chart Study Results
In two papers, Drew Skau and I recently showed that our idea of how we read pie charts is wrong, that donut charts are no worse than pie charts, and a few more things. Here is a detailed walk-through of the results of the three studies we conducted for this purpose. Let’s go on a little journey through some real data and do a little science together! [Read more…] about An Illustrated Tour of the Pie Chart Study Results
A Pair of Pie Chart Papers
How do we read pie charts? Do they differ from the even more reviled donut charts? What about common pie chart designs like exploded pies? In two papers to be presented at EuroVis next week, Drew Skau and I show that the common wisdom about how we read these charts (by angle) is almost certainly wrong, and that things are much more complicated than we thought. [Read more…] about A Pair of Pie Chart Papers
Ye Olde Pie Chart Debate
You may think that the debate over pie charts was a new one, but it has raged on for at least 100 years. Brinton started it in 1914, and great drama unfolded in the pages of the Journal of the American Statistical Association in the 1920s. [Read more…] about Ye Olde Pie Chart Debate