Well Made "Pies" Are Easier To Digest

Creating a visual experience for an audience to interpret is a fun and creative feat, but most importantly, it needs to be accurate. In order to explain and re-construct data to create that visual experience, one needs to understand the data themselves. Pie charts represent the percentages of a whole set of something. In the analogy of a chart being like a pie, all the slices together creates a whole. The sizes of the slices may vary, but together they construct a complete dessert. For this assignment, I chose to interpret the given data set and create a pie chart. Not only because pie is always top of mind for me, but because they are some of the easiest charts to understand. While they are a great tool to convey data sets to an audience, it may not be the best representation if the data is complicated. Most importantly, pie charts utilize percentages. This was a key factor in my decision to create a pie chart. The provided set of data had two rounds of percentages for the data, both of which correlated to the tier of the new clients. So I combined the two sets and created a pie chart...

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The assignment was to create a visual tool for the following set of data...

So, here is what I came up with...

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Why A Pie Chart?

I chose this graph because it is simple, clean and right to the point. I argue that pie charts are some of the easiest graphs to understand, typically because the set will represent a whole "pie" and show a complete picture of the data. When interpreting the revenue percentage as the complete set of data that comes to 100%, the pieces of the pie are easily filled in by the revenue percentage data set based by tier. If I had to change anything about the data set it would be that the totals fro the revenue percentage come to a clean 100% instead of 95%. But with some small adjustments in Excel, the pie chart is able to work around that problem. I also chose to go with this specific color scheme I chose because it was easy to determine the difference between each tier. I originally was looking for a monochrome color scheme but it was too hard to tell the difference by shade in the different slices of the pie if they were all slightly the same color.

Something Is Missing...

Something that is lacking in the pie chart above is context. What I would like to see reflected in the data, given that I had the original set of numbers, would be to include a timestamp for this data. Is this new client data for the quarter, year, week or month? Something to show how these numbers may compare to another set of data, like returning clients or the other new clients from a different time frame. I did make the title of the chart "highest earning" new clients to specify that the percentages in the chart are for revenue per tier, but I still would have liked to single out a certain time frame, i.e. quarter or month.