What do we see when we look at slices of a pie chart? Angles? Areas? Arc length? The answer to this question isn’t clear and thus “experts” recommend avoiding pie charts at all.
Robert Kosara is a Senior Research Scientist at Tableau Software (you should follow his blog https://eagereyes.org), who is very active in studying pie charts. In 2016, Robert Kosara and his collaborators published a series of studies about pie charts. There is a nice post called “An Illustrated Tour of the Pie Chart Study Results” that summarizes these studies.
Last week, Robert published another paper with a pretty confident title (“Evidence for Area as the Primary Visual Cue in Pie Charts”) and a very inconclusive conclusion
While this study suggests that the charts are read by area, itis not conclusive. In particular, the possibility of pie chart usersre-projecting the chart to read them cannot be ruled out. Furtherexperiments are therefore needed to zero in on the exact mechanismby which this common chart type is read.
Kosara. “Evidence for Area as the Primary Visual Cue in Pie Charts.” OSF, 17 Oct. 2019. Web.
The previous Kosara’s studies had strong practical implications, the most important being that pie charts are not evil provided they are done correctly. However, I’m not sure what I can take from this one. As far as I understand the data, the answer to the questions in the beginning of this post are still unclear. Maybe, the “real answer” to these questions is “a combination of thereof”.
Boris Gorelik 