Don't Use Spider Charts
A couple of days ago, I took the “Big 5” personality test on FiveThirtyEight, and I got these results:
Which reminded me how much I hate spider charts. Spider charts are almost always better visualized as some variation of a bar chart (see below). Here are the problems I have with spider charts:
Hard to compare the difference between categories
Categories next to each other on the wheel seem and “feel” as if they are related (by creating an area between the two wheel spokes) even though they aren’t
It’s hard to compare many individual results without either creating a “spaghetti bowl” chart or making one chart per individual
To prove my point, I remade the visualization in a few minutes. It’s not as pretty, but it’s certainly more readable:
