Infographics are horrible: tablet market share data
I am not a fan of infographics generally (unless there’s some really interesting stuff hidden away that no one looks at) because…look at this chart. This is very badly designed – in the US, about 11m iPads were sold (or something among the lines of). This is meant to be showing market share and if you look at the Apple slider alone, you look at the most distant dot: 82%. It’s not 82%, that’s 2010. Oh. Ohhh. And then you realise the legend is actually saying 2012 share of market is 55%.
Pay close attention and yes, it does say that market share is evening out between Apple, Samsung, Amazon, Asus and other manufacturers. But what a stupid way of showing it.
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I do get what you mean – especially the example above. On the other hand though I’d argue that infographics when done well can mean that the data becomes more accessible.
This got hammered home last week when I was working with our design teams to create some – they didn’t get the data shown (tabulations, pie charts, figures) as it didn’t make sense to them. It was outside their frame of reference and what the infographic can do is make that inforamtion make sense, without being trained how to read the source.
They are like sources in history though – there’s always a layer of interpretation and someone trying to guide you to what they think is the important thing – in a way that raw data never will. Maybe that’s what the rubbish ones are failing at?