What happens if you combine 3D WITH fading axes?

Posted by Tim Wilson - Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 08:07 am

I really hope this blog doesn’t become just a continuous series of rants around my pet peeves regarding data visualization. But…I stumbled across the following in a white paper about measuring visitor engagement on a web site.

This chart was generated from Unica’s Affinium NetInsight product. Unica is a great product, from everything I’ve heard. And, they seem to have a sharp acquisition strategy, based on their buying Sane (with NetTracker) several years ago.

But…this chart is pretty awful. It highlights how downright silly a gratuitous third dimension is. But, the “gradient to white” move on the Y-axis was a new one on me. Search engines 1 through 5 all actually have a value of 3. I did manage to figure this out without looking at the data itself in the report…but it was 3 beats more of mental exertion than it should have been.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 8:33 AM and is filed under Data Visualization. The entry is tagged under You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “What happens if you combine 3D WITH fading axes?”

  1. dinesh n m says:
    July 28th, 2007 at 8:31 AM

    Off-topic.

    SalesForce was in aquisition news back in early June.
    http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/04/salesforce-is-acquisition-bait/

    With the success of Google in acquisitions, I assumed it would have gone through. Apparently, they ended up being partners.

    http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/04/google-and-salesforce-do-the-mashup-dance/

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