https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/gallery/stress-japan
The world of data visualization has the ability to break down data for the masses. At the same time, the form the data takes can easily confuse the reader, leaving them gaining little knowledge of the subject being covered. As stress is one of the most buzzed about subjects, I am curious as to how it affects different parts of the world. I came across a stacked area chart which analyzes "the main preoccupations of Japanese [people] at each stage of their lives". Although I admire that the visualization is not only covering stress in Japan, but also, stress based on age, gender and sleep, I do not think it does a good job explaining the data clearly, probably for the same reason of it taking on too much. What makes this chart overwhelming is that at the bottom of the page, there are age ranges, then the chart itself consists of colours stacked on top of one another, with headings of stress factors on the right. The eye is left bewildered by all of the information. Luckily, once the reader scrolls over each heading, the data becomes slightly more absorable. I understand why the author chose to do a stacked area chart, as the sheer amount of information in this article is difficult to convey in any format. I further appreciate that the headings are both at the right hand corner of the page and on top of each colour. Scrolling over the headings also allows the reader to get a summary of each subject. However, what would have made the data less confusing would have been breaking down the information, so that the reader could clearly see the ages versus stress factors. I cannot think of a chart that could work better, but the visual is not working with this reasearch. A list format would have been ideal in this case. This chart is interactive and easy to use, based on being able to scoll over the heading and search specific information. In fact, the interaction is the strongest part of this visualization. Readers can click on a drop-down menu and seclect specific genders and sleeep times. If a Japanese person thinks of this as a tool to look up their own information, this data works perfectly. Nonetheless, what would have been simpler althogether, would have been to see the data clearly spelled out with the age range and stress factors, instead of broken into colours, especially since some of the colours are similar.
