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

Original


Source: Howmuch.net (2020).


Objective

The original visualization is taken from a literary website namely howmuch.net. The objective of the original visualization is to present the top 30 richest men in the world 2020 amid the pandemic. It also portrays each billionaire’s source of wealth as well as their country of origin. The data is retrieved from a real-time billionaire tracking tool from Forbes. The target audience for this visualization is a layperson with no technical knowledge of economics, with the intention of showing the richest men according to source of wealth associated with them.

The visualization chosen had the following three main issues:

1. Irresponsible use of Colour and Scale

Shade Blue is used to compartmentalise the amount of net worth between each billionaire as well as the sized circles corresponding to their estimated net worth. Colour is a powerful way to help the audience differentiate groups however it uses adequate contrast and does not highlight the important variable net worth. Both colour and scaling are used inappropriately and inefficiently, therefore, making it difficult to interpret. Moreover, it’s harder to notice the men that have under 100B net worth for the audience because the colours are roughly similar. The viewers need to go back and forth to the key to analyse their section. Visualizing using a simple bar graph with one solid colour with the same thresholds as the original will likely make the viewer understand better regarding the order of the billionaires.

2. Visual Bombardment (Cluttered Graphics and Lack of order)

The original visualisation overwhelms the audience and distracts them from the real message in the data as it is using heaps of colour, and multiple sized circles which paint a complex visual message. Ultimately, difficult to understand and interpret each billionaire’s net worth and other details. This is a clear case of clutter in data visualization and must be avoided at all costs. The visual is becoming so busy that it is rendered unreadable, a narrower focus is keenly required to share the story. It has an unnecessary world map underneath the circles to show their launched locations, as well as the companies, are quite congested laying on the bottom of the circle and some are outside lacking consistency. The information could be divided into a neat bar graph in a descending order starting from the highest owner of wealth for the viewers to focus on to avoid deception.

3. Failure to answer a practical question

The aim is to portray the World’s Top 30 Richest Men in the world which is a rather simple question to answer. The original visualisation has overcomplicated this task and produced a scattered visual leaving the viewers spending more time answering their questions and lacking clarity. Visual Bombardment, Issues with colour and scale impact on answering the research question accurately and possibly produce confused results to the audience. The visual lacks a sense of order because the top 20 richest men need to be in a descending order starting from the highest owner of wealth. This way, the viewer can focus easily on reading the order and answering the prime question with sense and clarity overall.

Reference

Code

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

# Loading the packages
library(readr)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
library(stringr)
library(knitr)

# Setting the working directory
getwd()
## [1] "/Users/Momitha_1/Desktop/Y3/DV/DataViz-assignment2"
setwd("/Users/Momitha_1/Desktop/Y3/DV/DataViz-assignment2")
getwd()
## [1] "/Users/Momitha_1/Desktop/Y3/DV/DataViz-assignment2"
# reading the data
Data <- read.csv("Data.csv")

# Checking the Structure of the data
str(Data)
## 'data.frame':    30 obs. of  4 variables:
##  $ Rank    : int  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
##  $ Name    : chr  "Jeff Bezos" "Elon Musk" "Bernard Arnault & family" "Bill Gates" ...
##  $ NetWorth: chr  "191.2 B" "153.5 B" "151.9 B" "120 B" ...
##  $ Source  : chr  "Amazon" "Tesla" "LVMH" "Microsoft" ...
# Removing unnecessary characters of in the NetWorth column to plot
# Stripping '$' and 'B'
Data$NetWorth<-gsub("B","",as.character(Data$NetWorth))

# Converting the variable NetWorth of each billionaire from character to numeric
Data$NetWorth <- as.numeric(Data$NetWorth)
Data$NetWorth
##  [1] 191.2 153.5 151.9 120.0  99.9  87.7  86.8  78.6  76.6  76.5  75.0  74.5
## [13]  74.5  67.2  66.9  63.1  61.4  59.1  55.4  54.9  53.0  47.3  44.9  44.5
## [25]  44.3  42.5  40.1  40.1  39.9  38.6
# Ordering Name of the billionaire to plot from descending order of wealth
Data$Name <- factor(Data$Name,levels = Data$Name[order(Data$NetWorth)])

# Plotting the barplot using ggplot2
d1 <- ggplot(Data, aes(x=Name,y=NetWorth))+
  geom_bar(stat = "identity" ,color = "#FFFFFF" , fill = "blue4")+
  geom_text(aes(y = NetWorth + 2 * sign(NetWorth), label =NetWorth,hjust=0.2), position = position_dodge(width = 0.1), size = 2.5, angle = 360)+
  ggtitle("Top 30 Richest Men in the World 2020")+ labs(x = "Name of Billionaire", y = "Net Worth (Billion Dollars)")+
  theme_minimal()+
  coord_flip()

Data Reference

Reconstruction

The following plot fixes the main issues in the original.