The numbers never change on this page: satisfaction by cabin class, from all 129,880 journeys. What changes is the judgment. Walk the five rungs — from a mute spreadsheet, through a lying pie and a mumbling default, to a chart that argues and a slide that decides.
BY SIMRAN JAISWAL · AFTER THE STORYTELLING-WITH-DATA MAKEOVER TRADITION
TIP · ARROW KEYS ← → WALK THE RUNGS
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✗ WHAT THIS RUNG GETS WRONG
✓ WHAT IT GETS RIGHT
◈ WHAT THIS PIECE DEMONSTRATES
Chart criticism as a skill — five versions of one dataset, each judged against the Cleveland–McGill perceptual hierarchy and Tufte's data-ink principle, with the reasoning shown.
The full maturity ladder — most analysts stop at rung 2 (the tool default). The gap between 2 and 4 is the entire craft of data communication.
Deliberate bad design — building a convincing 3-D exploded pie from raw SVG is its own proof you know exactly which rules it breaks.
Annotation layering — rung 4 shows how a chart becomes a slide: takeaway title, callout boxes, source line, one emphasis colour.
✎ FIELD NOTES — THE JUDGMENT CALLS
Why a pie is the crime: angles sit near the bottom of the Cleveland–McGill perceptual hierarchy — humans decode position on a common scale ~2× more accurately than angle. Add 3-D tilt and even the angles lie.
Why the default still fails: nothing is wrong — and nothing is said. Equal colors, no reference line, alphabetical order. The reader does the analyst's job.
What the final does: sorts by the story, spends color only on the point (economy's gap), draws the fleet average as a line to beat, and puts the takeaway in the title. Ink that isn't data is gone.