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I’ve only encountered box-and-whisker plots in stats or other quant classes that describe them but I’ve rarely seen them used outside of that. I’ve seen histograms used more frequently and I would say they are a better, if not the best, way to represent distribution data because you can quickly and easily interpret them even if you’re not familiar with histograms in general. Box-and-whisker plots on the other hand require remembering what each aspect means and so if you are not used to interpreting them, it can be difficult to understand what they are trying to show.
A horizontal bar graph would best display rankings as it allow you to quickly see which category has the most and how it compares to others. For both the Eastern and Northern zones, curative care visits would be ranked the highest (most frequent). For the Eastern zone, Inpatient medical and obstetrics would be tied for least frequent and in the Northern zone, speech therapy would be ranked least frequent.
I would also choose a line graph to show Flores del Mundo’s membership trends over the course of a year since it would most clearly convey the change over time. A line graph could be used to graph total membership versus employee/spouse/dependent over time but a bar graph may be more visually appealing and easier to quickly understand. The year could be divided into quarters to make it more condensed although this may hide some of the month to month changes. Since Eastern vs Northern would only be comparing two values, a line graph would probably work best since it’s easier to track two colors versus four but a bar graph could be appropriate here too.
Based on the readings, I believe the WHO local maternity dashboard really is a dashboard. While some of the design elements are distracting and could be improved for easier readability, the data is presented in a way that provides an at-a-glance view of relevant data that leads the reader to a predefined conclusion. The indicators included in the dashboard were chosen by local stakeholders and decision makers and therefore are directly relevant to the people using them. The traffic light color coding allows the reader to quickly see what metrics need improvement and the dashboard is contained to a single screen.
