I recently posted about how the Wall Street Journal’s graphical  interpretation of the American Time Use Survey left something to be desired. Their choice of both multiple pie charts and stacked bars with too many segments made comparisons difficult.

The time use survey is essentially “how does the average American spend their day” with categories such as Personal Care (mostly sleeping), and Purchasing Goods and Services. The responders to the survey also have information such as education, age, and ethnicity associated with their daily diary of activities.

When displaying data like these, you need to ask “what are people going to be interested in?” Questions that people could ask may be :

• How do hours of work vary with age?
• What is the gender share of household tasks by education level?
• How long do men spend mowing the grass in compared to women when there are young children in the house?

Okay, that last one is a little esoteric, but everyone has their area of interest. With services like Tableau, web versions of newspapers can now offer their readers the chance to really interact with data. Here’s the kind of thing both the Wall Street Journal or the Bureau of Labor Statistics could have offered their readers. I would suggest going here for the big version.

The Wall Street Journal, in this instance at least, needs to find an alternative to highly colored 3D pie charts with exploding wedges, and deliver real analyses into their readers’ hands. Combine this with well-placed sparklines as a standard part of the copy and suddenly online versions of the newspaper are incredibly rich compared to being just a copy of the print version. Imagine reading a story and being able to instantly drop into the data and gain a better understanding of how the article’s data may affect your business.

My interpretation is missing trending information – it is available over the last few years, but formatting the data for this exercise was involved enough. In an upcoming post I’ll talk about what the BLS could have done to be a better information enabler for the American public.

If you want your organization to be an information enabler, rather than a barrier to understanding, Data Driven can help with on-site seminars and data analytics.