A Quick Note on UX Design
James Thevathasan
Product Manager, Business Analyst / Mobile, Web, Cloud & Intelligent Assistant Technologies. Identify, Prioritise, Build and Launch customer-friendly products aligned with organisation outcomes.
What’s wrong with this graph?
The point of graphs is to quickly convey information. This is also true of UX design, especially on mobile platforms where space is at a premium. Hence, using this example is relevant to my fellow product managers.
A quick glance at this graph only shows us that forecast demand for hydrogen is expected to grow from approximately 100m tons today to approximately 400m tons in 2050. That much is clear so why all the colours?
Clearly the creator of the graph wanted to also convey what is driving this increase in hydrogen demand by showing the contributions of each sector. Unfortunately, the result on that metric is far less clear. It reminds me of a running gag in an episode of the ABC (Australia) TV series Utopia (Series 5, Episode 4 “Tunnel Vision” https://iview.abc.net.au/video/CO2211V004S00) where a graph in an (apparently) important report was presented initially in varying shades or purple. Subsequent attempts throughout the episode only made it worse.
But there is a very simple fix: re-order the legend to be in the same order as the graph itself! Isn’t that much clearer?