mikhail panchenko / blog

Just ordered hobo gloves over the internet. If that’s not ironic, I don’t know what is.

I cannot STAND when people use color codes or asterisks or any such similar devices that are supposed to make it easy to distinguish things, while either putting the key or legend in a completely unexpected place, or not providing any explanation at all. Doesn’t really help me that everything is in pretty, high-contrast colors if I can’t figure out what the HELL they mean! A visual aid is supposed to be just that – it’s supposed to aid the absorption of information using the visual faculty. A good visual aid requires a few quick glances to figure out what’s going on and get some important information out of it. The same essentially goes for a table.

What brought this on? The example I’ll use is probably not the best one, but it’s the one that brought this post to existence. I am an avid St. Louis Blues fan, but have gotten a little out of touch with the NHL as a league. I was looking at standings and could not, to save my life, figure out why teams that had fewer points showed up higher than my favorite hometown (sort of) team in the Conference standings (never mind how embarrassing it is not to know this as a hockey fan). I quickly noticed that all those teams had a * by them. What the FUCK does the star mean? You would think I would find it at the bottom of the table, where all the other little symbols used throughout the schedule were located, and where one would EXPECT to find them on such a table. Nope. Scroll down further? There’s a **, but that has nothing to do with the actual schedule. Eh?

Turns out, the geniuses at NHL.com put the explanation in the middle of a paragraph ABOVE the table. “Conference standings reflect the order in which teams would qualify for the playoffs. Division leaders (marked with a *) are automatically seeded first through third.” Of course. I even knew that, now that I think about it. NHL has weird playoff rules. But why, for the love of god, wouldn’t you just put that at the bottom of the table, with the rest of the key? Little things, but shit like this matters.

Off the top of my head, how to make a proper key for a table or visual aids:

• Put the key where it belongs. In a table, usually at the bottom. In a graph, somewhere off to the side in a box.
• Make it USEFUL AND EASY TO READ. If I feel like I need a key for the key, it’s not really a key. Also, perhaps your data doesn’t lend itself to visualization, at least not the way you have approached it, and it’s time to rethink the whole thing.
• Make it obvious that the key is a key. Put a border around it, use a different background color (something about this is ironic), do SOMETHING.

Click the thumbnail to see how NOT to do it.

This is the Ad Yahoo! Mail was running when I logged in earlier. I’m attaching it as a thumbnail, because this ad is an abomination – I can’t believe Yahoo! is actually letting crap like this run.