Kieran Healy kindly accepted my implicit homework assignment yesterday, and wrote a piece on Apple Sports’s bizarre “zero sum” team stats visualization:
It also doesn’t do away with the core problem. That problem is
principally one of information design rather than data
visualization. What I mean is that what we’re trying to organize
is, in effect, fifteen pairs of related but fundamentally distinct
numbers. If we had fifteen cases and two variables things
would be simple. But with fifteen variables and two cases … well,
this is not the kind of thing you can make a single effective and
non-confusing graph out of. That’s why I kind of sympathize with
the designer. In a constrained space they have to show thirty
numbers (thirty two, including the score). Lots of information. A
straight table seems like it would be boring. Surely there’s some
way to thematically integrate the numbers in a visually appealing
manner that brings out some of the relationships across the rows.
That’s what graphs do; it seems like the right thing to reach for.
But at its heart this information is not a graph. It just sort of
looks like one, and that ends up confusing people.
Just a crackerjack explanation for why this presentation in Apple Sports is confusing, and for why it is a difficult problem to solve. The problem is further complicated by the fact that Apple Sports shows the same screen for all sports, just with different sport-specific stats. I think the solution is to just present these numbers in a table. Yes, tables are boring. But they’re not confusing. What Apple Sports is doing, in an attempt not to be boring, is confusing.
Sidenote: Healy writes:
I don’t know much about basketball, but I do know a bit about data
visualization and in a pleasing coincidence my former student
Josh Fink is the A-VP of Basketball Data Science for the Spurs.
I don’t want to get Healy in any trouble, especially after he responded to my prompt with such a remarkably thoughtful, helpfully illustrated little essay, but I was under the impression that it’s illegal for any professor at Duke not to know much about basketball.
