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I don’t often encounter box & whisker plots at work (or in dashboards related to my work), although I have seen them in some research literature. Histograms, on the other hand, are common both at work and in dashboards related to my work.
While box & whisker plots are uncommon in my day-to-day work, I’m familiar with them generally. Once you understand what each component represents, they become a powerful tool for consolidating several descriptive statistics into a single plot.
For a public audience, histograms are far easier to interpret when communicating distributions. I would generally steer clear of box & whisker plots for non-technical audiences.
A bar chart would make the most sense.
Both groups have curative care as the most frequently used service. In the North, Speech Therapy is the the least frequent; in the East, it is Inpatient Obstetrics & Inpatient Medical.
I believe the content is indicative of a dashboard but the presentation of the content is not. It consolidates essential information into a concise, interpretable, one page view– but it is tabular, not graphical. I’m not sure it qualifies as ‘at a glance’ due to its layout/formatting (outside of the color-coding), but the data lends itself to ‘at a glance’ use. I prefer Few’s definition over Alexanders’, so I’m going to ignore the apparent violation re: not having pre-defined conclusions. Overall, I feel it has all of the ‘raw materials’ to be a dashboard, but lacks the design elements that are often found in dashboards. If pressed to choose, I would say that it is a dashboard– I believe the substance and usefulness of the presented data outweighs the design components that are missing.
