This may be the worst graph I’ve seen in my professional career.
- From a distance it looks like all the lines are heading down. I saw this on a dim screen. I initially thought the takeaway was that all the scores were going down.
- It is 3-dimensional for no reason. There is no extra information, only graphics for graphics sake.
- There is no reason to have a legend, since there is only one kind of thing being graphed, but one is present. And the labeling doesn’t match the title of the slide.
- Differentiation of horizontal scale is essentially even – they all have the same score. That fact is not emphasized. Instead, the horizontal scale is manipulated to emphasize the difference (doesn’t start at zero), but the stretching isn’t enough to show a difference. The manipulation didn’t even help. This leaves the labeling in non-intuitive numbers, 5, 7, and 9.
- There are horizontal axes guidelines for no reason. And worse, the lines go right through the labeling of the individual values, making the graph cluttered and hard to read.
- There are axes guidelines on the vertical axes, when the values are just the classes. Just horrible.
- The values are in no order. They are not sorted by results, they are not alphabetical. There should always be some logic to the way values are stacked.
Mainly, the graph serves no purpose. It gives no actual information. I have no idea what I, as a consumer of this information, am supposed to get. Perhaps it was “All classes are high value to participants”. That information could have been given by writing that exact statement, perhaps with “(all were in the 8-9 out 10 range as judged by participants)”. Since the biggest difference was 0.15 out of 10 points (a piddling 1.5%), perhaps the point was “Our survey showed that no matter what we teach we get the same scores.”
Or perhaps the key takeaway is, “Human Resources should never try to present analytic information.”