There have been several questions regarding the use of charts for displaying poll results. We would like to explain our choice because it is really important.
We believe pie charts are better to display poll results in the web than bar charts. In a pie chart you can always guarantee the spce that is going to be used: the area will never grow more than 2*pie*square.
Humans are better at understanding proportions by using a circle. Think of a wrist watch. The analog display is better in conveying the time consumed. A digital display showing only 7:46pm says very little.
When we thought about Pieall, we imagined a chart that could be portable to almost any medium without loosing context or proportion. But this is us, tell us what you think?
Going deep into the bar-chart issues:
ReplyDeleteIf you have a variable number answers, as we have in Pieall, that affects the size of the chart (not to mention embedding the poll in different sizes -more on that later-). As a result, the bar-charts might be forced to be really skinny or stand so close together that it makes it difficult to read.