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

Original


Source: HowMuch.net, a financial literacy website (2019).


Objective
The main objective of this visualization is to show how big Apple’s market capitalization compared to the other 15 entities. As Apple was the most valuable company the visualization puts it into context with the value of other entities.

Audience
The target audience is the general audience who needs to gain insight into how much more Apple is valuable compared to other entities. In addition, it is also for financial experts who study market activity want to know about the various market capitalizations. Lastly, it is for the Apple lovers who like to see the iPhone maker at the top.

The visualisation chosen had the following three main issues:

  • Ignoring the convention - The absence of the X and Y-axis in the visualization deceives the users. Furthermore, random labeling makes it much more difficult to interpret the visualization.

  • Area or Size to depict a quantity - The use of area or size to show the quantity lacks visual accuracy in the chosen visualization. The audience needs to look at different sizes and area of the circle to understand how big the market capitalization is compared to others. This deceptive technique misleads people in understanding the graph.

  • The 3D effect - The use of the 3D effect adds no meaning and value to the visualization. Moreover, the 3D circles are stacked one over the other making it visually hard to estimate the area and comprehend. Also, depth perception deceives the audience.

Reference

Code

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

library(readxl)
library(readr)
library(ggplot2)
library(RColorBrewer)

apple_data <- read_excel("appleviz.xlsx")
p1 <-
  ggplot(data = apple_data, aes(
    x = reorder(`Company/Country`, Value_billions) ,
    y = Value_billions
  ))
p1 <-
  p1 + geom_bar(stat = "identity" , fill = "#85bb65" , color = "black") +
  labs(title = "Putting the Apple's value into perspective",
       x = "Company/Country" , y = "Value in USD Billions") + theme_bw() +
  theme(
    plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0.5 ,
                              size = 35,
                              face = "bold") ,
    axis.title = element_text(size = 25, face = "bold") ,
    axis.text.x = element_text(size = 20 , face = "bold"),
    axis.text.y = element_text(size = 20, face = "bold")
  ) +
  geom_text(aes(label = paste0('$', `Value_billions`, 'B')), hjust = -0.1, size =
              5.5) +
  coord_flip()

Data Reference

Reconstruction

The main issues identified in original is addressed by-

  • Sticking to the convention
  • Values are indicated by length - Use of Bar Chart
  • Avoiding the 3D effect

The following plot fixes the main issues in the original.