by Andrea Hutson
The New York Times is one of the best places to look for good data visualization design. Some of their visualizations are truly mind blowing and thought-provoking, like this text analysis of presidential candidate song preference during their rallies (back when rallies were still allowed, and there were many more presidential candiates).
But sometimes, they miss the mark a bit. Take the graph below. The headline reads “U.S. Jobless Claims Soared to a Stunning 6.6 Million Last Week.”
This graph isn’t terrible, but it’s not great either. Three things I dislike:
- Grey bar in the middle – I get that it’s supposed to indicate when the recession took place, but there’s something that feels really off about it.
- Lots of irrelevant data in the middle – again, it’s there to show the general trend over time, but there’s just too much of it.
- The relevant data is squished WAY over to the side. This is the main issue — we’ve got so much data, that the real story gets lost. And the orange color isn’t helping, either.
COVID-19 Job Losses 10x Greater Than the 2008 Recession
How could we better display these data? Let’s try a hybrid graph.
Just to keep things simple, I used the left side of the initial NYT graph, and added on to the right side. Instead of just having one skinny line to represent the jobless claims of today, I added a large bar to show the new data. The large, red bar draws the eye to the important information, and the change in style also makes it clear that there’s been some sort of break here.
Then I added arrows, descriptions, and labels. The graph still isn’t perfect, but I think it’s better, and, importantly, it tells the story more clearly. And it wasn’t hard to do. With my reuse of the left side of the graph, and a very simple bar, this makeover in EXCEL and Word took less than 5 minutes.
Making the graph above, I realized that there was another big story buried here. I looked up some jobs data, and found that, in Feburary 2020, there were 129.73 million full-time employees in the United States. I realized that the job losses from last week were huge considering that fact, so I thought about how to best visualize it. Here’s what I came up with:
Many Americans Have Lost Their Jobs In the Past Two Weeks
I made this graph using a super-fancy proprietary software that I will be happy to sell to you for $199 per month.
Just kidding, y’all – I made this in PowerPoint.
Far from being sophisticated, these are just icons that I copy-pasted onto the screen a few dozen times. Add a couple text boxes, and it’s a pretty nice looking graph. Definitely better than a plain bar chart. Importantly, both graphs use the same information from the New York Times article, but tell distinct, and sobering stories.