IDG Contributor Network: The inevitability of data visualization criticism

I propose the following law:

"The longer an innovative visualization exists, the probability someone says it should have been a line/bar chart approaches 1"

I’ve seen the "shoulda been a line chart" suggestion many times, most recently in Randy Olson's excellent discussion of an award-winning visualization from the The Wall Street Journal. However, discussions like this forget a fundamental challenge when we communicate with data: Getting people to engage is sometimes as important as building the cognitively most valid method.

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