Bee Venom or Gold Cocoon? Visualisation in everyday life.

I was at Watsons yesterday. I saw a facial product that was based on bee venom, curiosity piqued, I picked up the product and took a look. I was very pleasantly surprised to find a neat visualisation of the product’s features.

Basically the manufacturer had decided to make it easier for potential customers to, at a glance understand the characteristics/benefits of the product:

 

 

Unsurprisingly for anyone who has had the pleasure, bee venom causes the skin to become smoother and firmer. I didn’t know about the anti-oxidation part.

Great job Watsons!

Right next to it, they had another product, another mask based on ‘gold cocoon’. 

Gold cocoon is good for skin radiance, protection and brightening.

How does it compare to the bee venom one?

Bee venom is on the left and gold cocoon on the right.

Ah… it’s no longer so useful, it’s very hard to compare the 2 products. I can see that bee venom might have better ‘skin firming’ properties than gold cocoon, and that’s with some effort and I am not so sure. And to make things worse, what is the difference between “transparency and radiance” where bee venom is not very highly rated and “skin radiance” where gold cocoon is?

While Watsons used a very appropriate visualisation of the benefits of every single product, they did not put themselves in a customer’s shoes. I would think it is natural to compare 2 similar products (in my mind 2 facial masks are similar), so I would like to compare the features. Does the fact that 4 axes are different mean that say bee venom has no effect on skin protection?

I think the customer experience is let down by the visualisation.

To me, while visualisation is a very powerful tool to convey a message, it must be done right.

First is the choice of the visualisation, to me Watsons chose an appropriate visualisation. A bar chart could have done a similar job, but I personally like these. I don’t have to count the position of the bar, with a limited number of axes (here 5) it is easy to compare the measures represented at the same angle.

Second is the ability to compare the visualisations, and therefore the axes need to be representing the same feature, in the same order, and using the same scale. In this case, they are quite different, in a different order, and there is no mention of scale. 

I think this illustrates the power and perils of visualisation. I do not think Watsons wanted to deceive the customer, but thought it was a good idea to present the information visually, that's great. But they missed the customer experience piece, when they did not make the visualisations easily comparable.

When 'data scientists' use visualisations, we have to bear in mind, not only what visualisation conveys the information we want to communicate better, but also the potential uses people receiving the information could put the visualisation to. Afterall, a good story is one that the recipient can follow and understand easily and clearly.