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Comment by kweinber | Hacker News Reader

This was a great example of design hindering interpretation. The graph’s diagonal/diamond shape made legibility much harder. A traditionally oriented graph would have been trivial to read and correlation more obvious.

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I think they were trying to show something meaningful with the orientation by having their "Trend Line" be the one horizontal metric.

I didn't really understand how they came up with that as a trend line.

I agree that they made an obvious decision to give design preference over legibility. My first glance at the page was "this is neat", but as I tried to wrap my brain around the data, my thoughts changed to "what an unnecessary mess".

I was physically turning my head 45 degrees to the right to figure out what was going on in the graph.

Completely agree. This graph is impossible to read.

You're right, this chart [1] from their blog post about it [2] is far easier to read. I don't like the design as given.

[1] http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...

[2] http://www.visualcapitalist.com/relationship-money-happiness...

I think it was an attempt to prove the point that money != happiness. But, ironically, the trend line shows the opposite: for majority of countries $ and happiness are correlated, hence the trend line.

Agree. But even the data is questionable. How can Singapore & Luxembourg be richer than Norway? Did they include all the Norwegian oil profits?

Yeah - this is nothing short of terrible.

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