[oscilloscope]

A couple critiques. The "No Breakout" view is almost meaningless. It would be more effective as a ranked list with words. If I take a screenshot of that, it means nothing. Circle positions, sizes, and colors encode no information in this initial view. The only way to get information is to hover, letting you browse the list in a disorganized fashion.

It's not clear on load what colors represent. There are no labels whatsoever. The colors make more sense on the "Country Breakout", but you lose the context again if you go to the "Industry Breakout". The last breakout also seems somewhat arbitrary. According to this, Google is part of "Internet Search". Don't they make hardware and software as well? Is IBM still a hardware company? The lines are fuzzy, but this categorical view draws a sharp divide between different sectors.

The graphic this is based on, Four Ways to Slice Obama's Budget Proposal, contains much more information and labels it well.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/13/us/politics/20...

Notice that circle area encodes proposed spending, which is a good measure of size/importance. The coloring is also a quantitative metric with an associated scale. When you go to the "Department Totals" view, you can see how the size/coloring reveals insights about proposed Defense spending (heavy cuts).

[jere]

Yea, I was going to post that the initial No Breakout view conveys absolutely no information. The colors haven't yet been explained, the circles are all the same size, and... there are 100 of them (but we already know that). Hovering over dots to find more information is really low bandwith.

Another point: the top category on the Industry Breakout view is obscured by the drop down. It wouldn't be such a big deal, but that category is probably the most important.

Also, selecting options from the drop down can leave you hovering over a different company, which creates a new hover tooltip. That's pretty confusing.

And a typo in the title: itsself