Click the Original, Code and Reconstruction tabs to read about the issues and how they were fixed.

Original


Source: ACMA Research and Analysis Section (2015).


Objective

The original data visualisation was originally intended to show the audience how to create a pie graph in excel. The purpose of this graph would be to show the National Basketball association (NBA) teams that have won the NBA Championships the most. The visualisation focuses on those teams that have won a minimum of 5 championships. An audience that may have an interest in this visualisation would be anyone that is interested in the National Basketball association (NBA), of North America, or those with a general interest in sport.

The visualisation chosen had the following three main issues:

  • Style - The visualisation is a 3D pie chart. Pie charts are difficult to interpret, and the 3D aspect adds an unwanted deception for the audience. Another graph style such as a bar chart should be used for an easy interpretation of the visualisation.

  • Text - The heading used is not descriptive. ‘NBA Championships’ could be a reference to the number of times a team participated in the championships or may be interpreted to have another meaning. The intended meaning of this was ‘NBA Championships won’. In addition to this the team names are unnecessarily long and complicated, making the data visualisation difficult to read. There is also a typo present in the current team names.

  • Colour - The colour choices for the teams is misleading, as all NBA teams have their own team colours. As one example, the colour dark green is often used to represent the Boston Celtics, however in this visualisation the Chicago bulls (who are represented by a shade of red), are represented by the Dark Green colour. This may be misleading to those in the audience that are familiar with the team colours, who may automatically correlate the colours with certain teams. Removing or changing these colours would make this graph easy to interpret on first glance.

Reference

Code

The following code was used to fix the issues identified in the original.

library(ggplot2)
NBA <- data.frame(Team = c("Boston Celtics", "Los Angeles Lakers", 
                                  "Golden State Warriors", "Chicago Bulls", "San Antonio Spurs", "other"),
                      Wins = c(17, 16, 6, 6, 5, 22))
NBA$Team <- factor(NBA$Team, levels = c("other", "Boston Celtics", "Los Angeles Lakers", "Chicago Bulls", "Golden State Warriors", "San Antonio Spurs"))

p1 <- ggplot(data = NBA, aes(x = reorder(Team, Wins), Wins, fill = Team, color = Team)) + geom_bar(stat = "identity", nudge_y = -2, nudge_x = 2) + theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = -30, vjust = 1, hjust = 0), plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0.5), axis.title.y = element_text(margin = margin(t = 0, r = 10, b = 0, l = 0))) + xlab(NULL) + scale_fill_manual(values=c("#5d5c61", "#007A33", "#552583", "#CE1141", "#1D428A", "#C4CED4")) + scale_color_manual(values=c("#28272b", "#28272b", "#28272b", "#28272b", "#28272b", "#28272b")) +  theme(legend.position = "none") + labs(title = "NBA Championships won", y = "Number of Wins", title.position = "centre")

Data Reference

Reconstruction

The following plot fixes the main issues in the original.