Bissantz Ponders
by Jon Peltier
Friday, December 19th, 2008
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2012.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Dr. Nicolas Bissantz is founder and General Manager of Bissantz & Company GmbH and master of Bella, the info viz expert. Bissantz makes the sparkline tools SparkMaker and SparkTicker and a Business Intelligence package called DeltaMaster. But Nicolas Bissantz is also the author of »Me, myself and BI«, an evocative and amusing blog which is my topic for today.
On his blog, Bissantz ponders such topics as Death to business charts!, Can we drive companies like we do cars?, Good reporting is boring, and Are sports fans smarter than managers?
Bissantz’ sidekick Bella has her own blog, where she deals with less weighty but equally important info viz topics. Bella muses on various topics, frequently showing a bad graphic and a reworked and improved version side by side.
Bella, the info viz expert.
The Me, Myself and BI blog is only updated fortnightly, but when it is published, it is clear that Bissantz has earned his devil’s horns. In Lots of froth he describes an ill-fated attempt by a business magazine to invent a currency based on cappuccino. My first glance at the faux small multiple graphic made no sense, and I doubt it had anything to do with my poor grasp of German.
Each of the items in this image occupies a similar area, and each has roughly equivalent blobs of bright red obscuring its message. In fact, the actual units of display, the cups of cappuccino, are distorted. Despite the magnitude of the value, the cappuccino cups are adjusted in size to occupy the same area. Apparently the serving size ranges from a thimbleful to a gallon (which is what, about a liter in Europe?). There’s even an error in conversion, as the stated price for a cup of cappuccino is substantially less than the costs of cappuccino on the street.
Bissantz has retrieved the raw data and constructed his own version of the data. I don’t really know what the numbers are supposed to represent, not related to coffee at all, but perhaps something about the burden of undocumented fees? The online translation engines are confused and my high school German is not up to the task.
Despite my ignorance, I can see instantly that the range from the highest to lowest is 50 to 1. In fact, the highest is 1/3 greater than the second highest and almost three times the third highest. All this from a boring little bar chart. Who would have expected that?
“Lots of froth” describes much of today’s info graphics; as does “decaffeinated”. This bar chart is dark roasted, rich and flavorful.
Disclosure: This review is unsolicited and unpaid. It was spurred only by my amusement at the latest Me, myself and BI blog entry. I receive no monetary gain from mentioning Bissantz and the Bissantz line of products, except indirectly in the event that Google places a Bissantz advertisement among my hosted AdSense ads.
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Posted: Friday, December 19th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 11
Comments
Comment from Jorge Camoes
Time: Friday, December 19, 2008, 5:35 pm
Jon, I’ll start calling this “chartainment”, defined by the use of some data by a graphic designer with the sole purpose of grabbing the attention of the reader. This is not data visualization and shouldn’t be compared with a traditional chart because they don’t share the same logic.
We often indulge ourselves in this exercise because it is obvious for us that a bar chart (in this case) does a much better job. But this increased efficiency means that the reader will leave the page earlier (and better informed). On the contrary, chartainment means longer average time per page, and that translates into a higher probability of an ad to get noticed. That’s the real goal.
My Christmas cynicism at work…
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Friday, December 19, 2008, 5:41 pm
Jorge -
Nice point about “chartainment”. That word needs another syllable, though. “Chartutainment”?
If the goal is to get more ads noticed, why splash quite so much red ink around the chart figure? It’s competing with the ads for attention.
Comment from Jorge Camoes
Time: Friday, December 19, 2008, 6:50 pm
I just replaced “info” in “infotainment” with “chart”… Chartutainment? Something that you do in Chartuterie? :)
The figure forces you to stop and that’s all that matters. The ad is in your peripheral vision, waiting patiently. Now, before leaving, you’ll ask yourself “is there anything else to see around here? Ah… what a lovely salami ad…” :)
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Friday, December 19, 2008, 7:11 pm
Yeah, I was riffing on “edutainment”. Chartutainment, chartotainment. Some marketing guy is going to latch onto chart-attainment.
Comment from nixnut
Time: Saturday, December 20, 2008, 8:10 am
In case somebody’s wondering, it’s seems to be about ‘hidden’ taxes and tariffs on all sorts of goods and services translated into cups of cappuccino you could have bought for that amount of money.
As for the infographic itself, it could have been executed better. Even for chart(ut)ainment it’s pretty bad imho.
Comment from derek
Time: Saturday, December 20, 2008, 8:21 am
I enjoy the Bissantz blogs, but there seems to be a problem with the RSS feed: they only appear in my aggregator about two weeks after they were first posted.
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Saturday, December 20, 2008, 8:46 am
Nixnut – Thanks for the explanation.
Derek – Funny, I checked the date on the article, and I got the feed for this article a week late.
Comment from Ray
Time: Saturday, December 20, 2008, 11:25 am
Hello Jon
I’m a frequent reader and really do enjoy your blog, the tipps and pretty much everything else on your site.
That said, here a few inputs to this post:
- A gallon is about 4 liters in Europe.
- You can get a cup of cappuccino for 2 Euro in Germany, if you go to a reasonably priced place outside of a major city
- The article was about hidden fees and taxes, that are said to be the equivalent of a few cups of cappuccino per year, therefore they aren’t relevant. The “chart” wanted to show, that we’re talking about almost 400 cups of cappuccino – which adds to up quite a bit
Of course I agree with you, that this “chart” doesn’t even deserve to be called a chart.
Cheers
Ray
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Saturday, December 20, 2008, 1:05 pm
Ray -
Thanks for the note. I do know the conversion between liters and gallons, by the way. A gallon is just under four liters. I was being sarcastic. Someday the US will assume the international system of measurements. Or not.
Comment from Ray
Time: Sunday, December 21, 2008, 9:36 am
Jon –
I kinda thought this might have been sarcasm on your part :-)
Keep the miles and the gallons, but you really need to let go of the Farenheit
Happy Holidays
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Sunday, December 21, 2008, 9:44 am
Ray -
I have a client in Western Canada, in the hills outside Calgary. We were comparing weather the other day. Here in Massachusetts we’d had an ice storm which knocked out some folks’ power for days (not mine, fortunately). He mentioned that their outside temperature was -33. I was about to ask, C or F, but then I realized either way, it’s colder than I could imagine.
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