How to Judge Visualizations

Read Junk Charts Trifecta Checkup

Kaiser Fung has a useful framework for judging the quality of data visualizations. He calls his framework the Junk Charts Trifecta Checkup. To make that shorter, we’ll just call this framework the Trifecta Checkup. This framework boils down to the following 3 questions:

1. What is the question?
2. What does the data say?
3. What does the visual say?

Each visualization can be labeled according to which question(s) it does not answer well. For example, a chart with a meaningful question and relevant data, but ineffective visuals, would be labeled v. A chart that gets the data and question wrong, but has a nice visual, would be labeled qd.