How Style of Information Delivery affects Quick Understanding
I came across a great example from Esri Business Partner S&P Global Platts of how they use the same starting data in different ways in their weekly report on US drilling rig activity. The Platts Upstream Indicator is a free report available at https://rigdata.com/. It starts off as a data extract from SQL Server which then gets massaged into different styles of information presentation.
As a Table - lots of details and uses the "where" as state or offshore. You have to study this table to understand what has been happening as there are lots of numbers.
As a Chart - Really great to show trends over time and uses the "where" as activity by major oil and gas basin. Again, lots of information represented that a user would need to digest before understanding what was really going on.
As a Map - Needless to say my favorite but it has everything you need to know in just a glance:
- Where are the producing basins (as the slightly darker areas) and in what state(s)
- By proportional symbol what and where is the level of rig activity (the hyper-active Permian Basin in West Texas sticks out)
- Composite labels at each location give just the right amount of stats on absolute numbers plus changes up and down from a year before
This was not the first ArcGIS-derived map that this weekly report has used but this latest design introduced in August 2018 is by far the clearest and most thoughtful cartography the S&P Global Platts GIS team in Denver has produced. It was done with ArcGIS Pro and apart from a couple of manual tweaks is mostly scripted as an automated process to create.