4 Mar, 2008
Pie charts considered harmful
“The only worse design than a pie chart is several of them, for then the viewer is asked to compare quantities in spatial disarray both within and between pieces.”
Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Despite their high price tags, many enterprise security solutions display a lack of thought in their user interfaces. Around the Napera office, there’s a running joke about Steve Jobs alleged fanaticism on user interfaces at Apple and I’m known as somewhat of a curmudgeon on the topic. There’s a good reason for it, because I think user experience should be a design goal right up there with speeds and feeds.
A pet peeve of mine is reliance on pie charts. Circular shapes are generally an inferior way to display information, and research has shown that forcing users to compare data by angle is less accurate than using comparison by length. It is typically better to use a mechanism in which differences can be compared linearly.
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