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June 29, 2015

Makeover Monday: A Day in the Life

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This week’s Makeover Monday is brought to you by the great Emma Whyte of The Information Lab. If you’re not following her great work, you need to. She’s absolutely brilliant.

I found an infographic on Twitter this week from the Wall Street Journal that described the average American's day.

There are several problems with this infographic:
  • It's really hard to see easily what American's spend most and least of their time doing 
  • It's difficult to compare the years - the colour encoding helps, but you have to work out the actual change in your head 
  • Your eyes have to look around a lot to get the whole picture 
  • There's a lot of reading involved 
  • The squares equal one minute - but it's hard to compare values using area I had a go at making an alternative. 

I have to admit I couldn't find the same data set that the Wall Street Journal used. I downloaded this one from the Bureau of Labor Stats (hence my numbers don't exactly match).



In this version I have:
  • Changed the infographic to a bullet chart - the bars show the 2014 values and the reference line 2004 values. 
  • Sorted the bars by the 2014 value 
  • Coloured the bars by the change, to let you easily spot increases / decreases 
  • Added tool-tips to show the actual change (rather than doing the Math in your head) 

You can download my viz from Tableau Public here.

Would you do anything differently?

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