[tophtucker]

Oops yup shared!

I gave a presentation once on why I kinda like pie charts but it was based on zero research so I'd be interested to see that. I mean I think if you're just showing one whole they're as intuitive as any visualization can get. It's a populist cause.

>What cyclic modular spatial visual encoding can you find to encode your proportions other than angle? I get that it’s sorta hard to compare across pie charts. But if you see a stacked bar chart, nothing about it signals that it’s out of 100%! No Cartesian encoding is a non-arbitrary 100%! Whereas pie charts need no axis! Everywhere in the universe, 360º ≅ 0º. Pie charts carry their axis with them throughout the universe! That’s very special!

— from https://medium.com/@tophtucker/doing-enterprise-financial-da...

[JadedBlueEyes]

From a data visualisation perspective, pie charts are kind of terrible. Primarily because they are really easy to misinterpret, and because they handle many divisions poorly. I prefer spark charts, like github's language percentage bar.

[vanderZwan]

> Primarily because they are really easy to misinterpret

No, that's the thing. This is something that was asserted early one by someone influential, without any data to back it up. And then when HCI people started to actually test it they found no issues whatsoever.

I wish I had bookmarked the sites/videos where I saw this.

[whacked_new]

wow, thanks for sharing that post. how many revisions was that? you're a hell of a writer.