Mockups for graphs

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Kaiser discusses here the value of sketching preliminary versions of a plot to see what might work, before going to the effort of making the full graph. I agree completely–in my class on graphics, we would go through several mock-ups before trying to program something up.

The only trouble is that I don’t know of any software for mockups. Ideally one could draw these prototypes and then feed in the data and see what the plots look like. A menu of 50 or so prototypes might do it, I suppose.

One other thing: in a comment here, Derek refers to the “objects” of a graph, i.e., what’s being plotted. (For example, in a scatterplot, each dot is a what?) One of my pet peeves with graphs–and data descriptions in general–is that it’s standard to label the axes, and often the plot itself, but rarely are the individual objects labeled. I often see a scatterplot where I can’t figure out what’s being plotted. I would usually ask people, “what are the units of the plot” (using the term “unit” as used in survey sampling, for the items being measured), but this just confuses people, because they think of units of measurement (kilograms or whatever). I’ll try the term “object” and see how it goes.

I’ve been trying to train people to describe a plot by, instead of saying, “This is a graph of weight vs. height”, to say, “Each dot is a person. Weight is on the vertical axis and height is on the horizontal axis.” It’s tough, though. People internalize the objects and forget that others don’t know what’s being plotted.

6 thoughts on “Mockups for graphs”

  1. As much as I hate to raise it on such an R – centered site, Stata's "new" (post-V7, which is not that new) graphics engine is great for this. The pull-down menu lets one "submit" the graph (which is then drawn on the screen), tinker with details, "submit" again, etc. Very interactive. It's also good with the sorts of labels AG mentions.

  2. I use either pencil or paper for my own mock-ups, or the same software as I would use for the finished graphic. For the past dozen years that software has been Microsoft Excel.

    I generally plot the data a number of ways with a number of chart types, often with intermediate manipulation of data to rearrange rows and columns or to otherwise group the data in certain ways. Excel's pivot tables are a useful tool for this manipulation, because they can so rapidly provide different cuts through the data.

    I realize in statistical circles it's near heresy to admit to relying on a tool like Excel. But Excel is appropriate when the user has some knowledge of where (statistically) to be careful, and in situations when precise statistical analysis is overkill (like most business and many engineering applications).

  3. What about observation rather than object? What are the observations you are plotting? Maybe that's not much better, because people would say "I'm plotting all my observations".

    If you're using R to make your graphics, ggplot makes it pretty easy to experiment with different types of graphics (and see the nearly 500 examples on the web site). It's based on Wilkinson's grammar of graphics so the different components of a graphic are (fairly) cleanly separated, making it easy to experiment with them independently. Iteration is facilitated because it's easy to take an existing graphic and tweak it in some small (or not so small) way.

  5. Like Jon, I also use the old-fashioned hand sketches. However, I could imagine a product that generates graphs in a sandbox type of environment, where it would be super-easy to drag labels around, switch axis, etc. all interactively, on the canvass.

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