Information design fail

[kpreid]

I thought I knew better, but it took someone else to point out what was wrong with this display of times available for appointments:

If it happens not to leap out at you: which color indicates available, and which indicates unavailable? I knew perfectly well, of course: I drew shaded boxes to indicate the times of interest, i.e. the available ones — but the interpretation that the unavailable times are blocked off is equally plausible.

This could be solved by a legend, but that is less readable at a glance and unaesthetic. What I did — after printing several copies and then having the problem pointed out — was hand-draw arrows-to-bars (⇤⇥) vertically over the available spans. But what would have been a good clean solution to start with? What comes to mind is to eliminate the grid lines in the unavailable areas, so that only the gray-is-available interpretation provides definite start and end times.

What would you do?

Comments

[wrog]

it took someone else to point out what was wrong with this display of times

hm. The first thing that leaped out at me was the (non)alignment of the hour numbers with the rows, i.e., is the first row of the chart supposed to be 8:30-9:00 or 9:00-9:30?

[kpreid.livejournal.com]

8:30-9:00. The hour numbers are placed at the :00 for that hour.

That gives me another idea: placing the start and end times within the boxes. Then the specific times are explicitly stated, but it's still presented graphically and compactly.

[wrog]

8:30-9:00. The hour numbers are placed at the :00 for that hour.

hm . . . and here I was figuring that to be the lower probability answer, even though I think I prefer that version of the world. But what you need to make that work is having the hour-line be thicker than the half-hour line; that way, the eye will group the 8:30-9:00 row by itself and the next two rows (9:00-9:30,9:30-10) together, and then it's clear that the row numbers are labeling hour lines rather than being centered on hour intervals.

That gives me another idea: placing the start and end times within the boxes.

bleah. That 10:00 on Monday is actually above the 10:00 line? I tend to see that as extending to 10:30 or something. Also doesn't help that the later hours are vertically contracted, so any visual cues based on the height of the boxes are useless (first slot on monday is 90 minutes but the first slot on Tuesday is 2 hours and they're the same height? bleah.)

[kpreid.livejournal.com]

I like the heavy hour lines idea. The original graphic was made using uniform box borders so it'd be trickier, but certainly worth doing.

The vertical contraction was a mistake; I didn't review my construction carefully enough. I think the numbers-in-boxes would work better if the boxes were larger relative to the text size.