Take a moment and look at the NBC Olympics page (screenshot below). What do you see? What impressions do you get from what you see? What questions pop into your head about what you see? What conclusions can you make from what you see?
For me, I see a classic mistake. I see an unnecessary, misleading visualization. I see... a doughnut chart. Doh!
What bugs me about this visualization is that everything I need to walk away with some insight is written out in the middle of each doughnut, or circle. Let's have a little exercise, shall we?
Which country has the most total medals? Norway has 11 total medals.
How does the next country compare? Canada has 9 total medals.
How many of each medal has each country earned? Norway has 4 gold medals and 3 silver medals and Canada has earned the same. In fact, where Norway beats Canada in the race for total medals is in bronze medals, where it picked up 4 while Canada has only earned 2.
Ok, I'm satisfied with the information I've received. The data in the center of each doughnut helped answered my questions about the top 2 countries with the most medals, the total medal gap between the two countries, and what is causing the gap.
If this is the information I need, then why am I presented with the surrounding doughnut chart? Is it because it looks cool? Is it because doughnuts are undeniably tasty? Let's think about what happens when we remove the data in the center of each doughnut.
Without the data in the center of each chart, I have 3 big, distracting doughnuts with gold, silver, and bronze slices. Canada's gold and silver slices are bigger than Norway's. Conclusion, Canada has more gold and silver medals than Norway, obviously making Canada a better performer than Norway. Then why is Canada in 2nd place?
Doughnut charts offer a good look at how proportions factor into a total distribution. In this case, Canada is actually doing better than Norway in the proportion of gold and silver medals it has earned. But who really cares about this fact? This is the Olympics, for crying out loud, where total medals are what counts, not the proportion of medals a country has earned.
To give the NBC Olympics' page some credit, they allow the user to view the data through a stacked bar chart, which is how I'd prefer to view the data. Not only do I get a clear sense of the total medals, I also have a proportional view of the gold, silver, and bronze medal counts for each country. All that anxiety about doughnuts just to get what I was looking for one mouse scroll below...
Thanks for reading and I hope you all noticed the ridiculous McDonald's ad on each side of the page, which tries to equate eating a chicken mcnugget to biting down on an Olympic gold medal. All I can say is that I hope those mcnuggets taste better than that lousy 3-toned doughnut...