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Comment by noahlt | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating statistics. I wish the charts had been designed in a way that made it easier to compare the numbers: for instance, I want to visually compare the number of hours that each country spends sleeping, but these charts force me to read the numbers instead of interpreting the graphics.

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A classic example of a poor choice of visualisation. Pie and donuts aren't always useless but they're very awkward to interpret here.

I made a quick'n'dirty replacement using a stacked column chart if anyone is interested:

https://demo.geckoboard.com/dashboard/CF6225A8BF97972D/

Better, but still hard to read, I think. If I want to compare the green bars for two countries, they don't sit side by side, because the sections under them are of varying heights.

I think this would be more ideal:

Country 1 Work :XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (X%)

Country 2 Work :XXXXXXXXXXXXX (X%)

Country 1 Sleep:XXXXXXXXXXXXXX (X%)

Country 2 Sleep:XXXXXXXXXXXX (X%)

OK, I've added detail charts - one for each metric - so you can easily compare metrics for each country side-by-side.

Pie charts are mostly useless...

I really don't see any reason for their usage here, except of their resemblance to the shape of the sun (and analog clock).

If only the world would stop using pie charts. They are inherently broken. http://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/please-dont-use-pie-charts.html

Agreed --- looks like the rankings of the variables are the same for each country, and even the ratios vary only slightly. This information would be better presented in a table (with standard error reported) or a bar graph. The original OECD[1] report presents this information much more lucidly. When The Economist filtered the OED report, they should have paid more attention to clarity of presentation.

[1] http://www.oecd.org/document/24/0,3343,en_2649_34637_2671576...

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