Saturday, February 2, 2019

Mediocre graphics about crisis management


At Agility PR Solutions on January 8, 2019 there was an article by Bulldog Reporter titled Brands are losing faith in their crisis management plans – here’s how to restore it. When I looked at the first two graphics in it, I instead lost faith in the author’s graphical competence.




















Look at the 3-D donut chart (shown above) for answering Which crisis do you feel least prepared for? (Click on it to see a larger, clearer view). It has 11 different items, which is way too many, and those items are not shown in rank order. Terrorism (27.1%) is the largest item, and shown going counterclockwise from the top. But Cyber Breach (19.5%), the second item, is shown as the fourth item going clockwise.


















A 2-D horizontal bar chart, as shown above, does a better job of listing all those percentages.     



















The second graphic is a vertical bar chart for answering Which potential issues does your crisis management plan address? It has 12 color-coded items, but confusingly repeats colors from the first four on the last four. Also, those colors do not match those used on the previous chart. There is no percent label on the vertical axis, and the labels for the horizontal axis are angled.






















I call those 45-degree captions Bannister Captions, because they remind me of a small boy recklessly sliding downstairs. Adults should do something better.
















Another 2-D horizontal bar chart (shown above) does a better job of showing those percentages without needing different colors.     

The cartoon showing a boy going downstairs was adapted from one at Openclipart.  

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