Andrew Smith sends in this:
He writes, “I think it beats the pie chart you referenced in your previous blog post! My brain still hurts trying to parse it.”
In all seriousness: yes, a scatterplot would be better. And they gotta work on their axis labeling. “61.8?”
P.S. In contrast, the photographic height/weight chart is excellent.
My favourite part is the legend on the right hand side.
I don't know how I begin to understand the graph without it.
That would be a fairly easy one to clean up, though.
Changing the Y axis from defaulting to a gap of 3.4 to 3.5 would make it easier.
At first, it appears to be a two-dimensional graphic (height in inches on the Y axis, weight in pounds on the X) set up as a 3D chart for no apparent reason.
Which implies that the third dimension is number of people guessing, with the colors representing variance from the actual on either scale (63.5, 314).
I'd still be inclined to do it as a 2D graphic with labels–and not having text for the legend (which should be centered at the bottom) is clearly a problem–but it's not a poor representation of what it's trying to show: how poorly (well) people estimated height and weight from the original picture.
"Oh, the rotundity!"
see also: "Oh, the huge manatee!"