What's wrong with this picture...

[sobrique]

It really annoys me when companies do things like this:

Comments

[crashbarrier.livejournal.com]

Huh?...that hurts my head..

[xarrion.livejournal.com]

Well, it is strictly valid as it says 'up to', but really needs small print stating '5% saving shown'

[queex.livejournal.com]

I was reading it as intended to be the other way round- the blue is what you pay now, the whole cylinder what you used to pay. So the first one is all cock-eyed.

[xarrion.livejournal.com]

I read it as 'your blue bar used to be emptied, but now you have 33% saved/left'

[queex.livejournal.com]

I think what we can take away from this is that the graphic is truly piss-poor.

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

Indeed. There were 6 of them, in all, and they were all similarly 'yeah whatever' sorts of fills of the cylinder.

I also get annoyed whenever I see a graph with an 'axis' that doesn't go through zero, for much the same reason.
Or they ninja in a log scale, or something similar.
I'm sure there are data for which such things are an appropriate representation - but typically, these are not the sorts of things that are seen on powerpoint slides/training materials.

[erjholton.livejournal.com]

My guess on the first one is that the designer realised that, if the blue was at the proper level, the text would either have to cross from the grey to the blue or would have to be moved to the lower part of the cylinder. Either might have been regarded as a more undesirable outcome than the current graphic.

Or it was just incompetence.