To be Accurate or Eye Catching?

Warning: Geeky Data Vis Post - keep scrolling if accurate visuals are not your thing

So I stumbled upon a nice marketing visual at the VW dealer today.? Almost literally. The visual was on the floor.??

I liked it at first.? It’s a visual showing how your stopping distance is affected in wet conditions as your tyre wear increases. For those who haven’t been to driving school for a while, or haven’t done braking under wet conditions training, it’s easy to forget how much further it takes to stop in the wet. ?I marvelled at how the marketing department had incorporated pre-attentive features into the design, using how humans can understand differences in length quickly, without really needing to think about it.? They even worked in some amber and red colouring for the project manager in people.? Nice.

But then my data vis powers kicked in. I took a read of the data - ~26m to stop in optimal tyres.? ~40 meters in poor tyres.? I looked at the floor again. Something felt wrong. I did some mental thinking work and realised the visual was wrong, way wrong.? The distance in the “graph” for poor condition tyres is more than 3 times longer than the distance of optimal tyres.? Even without a calculator I could work out 40m is not three times 26m. Then I did reach for a calculator and worked the data.? If the visual is accurate, the stopping distance for poor wet tyres would be nearly 84m.?

Still with the calculator, if the data is correct, the marked distances would be much closer together. That would certainly change the impact the message is trying to make. I marked them with red lines.???

A data conundrum.?

The display on the floor, close to the tyre department, is a good visual that grabs peoples attention and communicates an important message - poor condition tyres take longer to stop - without making them do mental math to understand.

Yet the data is inaccurately represented.? It does not actually take three times as much distance to stop in the rain with worn tyres.

?

What do you think???

It's a good visual, to heck with being accurate.

Get the folks to fix their design. Data accuracy is all.

I wish I had people in my team who could spot discrepancies like that in my data visuals.

Yeah, it's a data vis geek post.? I'm going back to scrolling.