Question 17
Lakshmi's team is rebuilding the state public health dashboard. Its main screen tracks weekly dengue case counts across fourteen districts, and the audience is district health officers who open it each Monday morning. The current version renders each district as a 3D bar chart on a tinted panel, one district per screen, with a caption block beneath.
Which of the team's proposed changes follow Tufte's principles for graphical excellence?
Printing the week the monsoon broke directly onto the outbreak curve, instead of noting it in the caption block below
Replacing the fourteen district series with a single state-wide weekly total, so that officers have less to read
Showing all fourteen districts as small multiples on one screen against a shared axis, so profiles can be compared across the state at a glance
Replacing the 3D bars with flat bars and removing the tinted panel background, since neither carries a value that would be lost by erasing it
Encoding weekly cases as the width of a rectangle and weekly growth rate as its height, so both variables travel in a single mark
Deleting the axis tick labels and district names, since removing ink always raises the data-ink ratio