The Poker Copilot Blog

Tracking the development of Poker Copilot, Mac OS X software for poker analysis and statistics.

Saturday, 19 July 2008

Great Example of Data Visualisation

NFL Player IQ by Position Played

I'm not a North American. I understand close to nothing about that funny type of football they play there. Yet I understood the graphic shown at the linked page with almost no conscious thinking.

Now to invent such clever visualisations for Poker Copilot. Suggestions appreciated.

Posted by Steve McLeod at 2:18 PM

1 comments:

Rob Meredith said...

Hmm. I personally think the visualisation is pretty poor. If you click through to the original article from the one you linked to, you'll see a couple of different versions, including one with the numeric scores. This diagram is actually far easier to read and understand than the supposed final diagram that's in the linked post.

The reason I think it's pretty crap is that values are represented by the size of the circles. People are hopeless at perceiving sizes this way, in part because our brains don't really follow the mathematical rule that says area of a circle doesn't grow linearly as the radius increases. That is, a circle that looks twice as big as another circle is, in fact, a lot bigger in area than a factor of two. In a chart trying to depict, in part, magnitude, choosing circles means that the physical representation of differences in magnitude is actually x:sqrt(x) rather than x:x.

The other is the problem of trying to compare one shape to another, surrounded by a whole lot of other shapes. Compare, for example the 'OG' to the 'TE': which one is bigger? To my eye, I wouldn't be able to tell them apart, and yet one is smaller than the other.

These are the same problems that pie charts have, and why they generally should not be used. Presumably, the 'story' of the chart is that there is a negative correlation between distance from the ball and test scores. In terms of readability, a table of numbers (with distance from the ball and test score as two columns) sorted on one of the columns would tell this story much more effectively. Alternatively a scatter plot showing clustering along an axis also would be better. Even the same diagram with numbers rather than position names works far more effectively, since most of the readers of the diagram would know the positions anyway.

20 July 2008 1:11 AM

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