A new web service, VisualSport, came to my attention today. It looks like the service is still under development, but below is the comparison between two football (soccer) players.
From the About page:
Welcome to VisualSport, the revolution in living sport. VisualSport has been created to help people to enrich their sport experience: it will start using interactive sharable visualizations. What you are now using is just a simple demo of what VisualSport will really be in upcoming monthes [sic]
Typos aside (I do not think the person who wrote their About page is a native English speaker), I think the visualization shows a lot of promise. I do think it serves as an example of poor measure labeling. I had trouble figuring out what the site’s purpose was.
The name VisualSports suggests coverage of multiple sports, but I believe, so far, it is focused on football (soccer). From the home page: “High Quality Stats: Access to full football data archives about the Champions League and the Italian tournament and enhance your knowledge.” The link to the preview states: “Analyze with the ViSpo Compare the performances of two of the “Champions League” or “SerieA” players!”
As an American, football to me means tackle football played with a pigskin, actually a prolate spheroid, versus a round ball. I do not know what the Champions League or the Italian tournament is. So obviously, I’m outside of their intended audience.
That aside, when you look at the visualization, better labeling would enhance understanding, see below. I have trouble understanding what is measured here. I find the color coding effective and the display is great. I just don’t know what the measure graphed is.
Below is another example. I’m not familiar with the measures in the display: presence, offense, defense, correctness, and gameplay. It would be helpful to have links to definitions of these data. Moreover, I’m not sure what the measures on the radial graph represent. What are the units of these measures? What is behind the stars measures?
In the General Stats display, the measures do not include units. The reader must infer. Additionally, the scale, range, or actual value is not shown. You can see that the right player passes more than the left player, but there is no indication of order of magnitude. Since each of the measures is probably at a different scale, labeling of scale and units would be helpful.
I think the heatmap included is amazing.
A legend showing what the coloration represents would help. I’m amazed that this information exists – what part of the field various players touch the ball. Fantastic.
In general, I find this display really interesting, with a lot of promise, especially if the labeling is improved.
What do you think?
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Category and Tags
This post filed in the following categories:
- Statistics - Statistics is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data.
- Visualization - Visualization is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message.
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now that its done i wonder if its good enough to join the list !"
He did one small mistake, unfortunately everyone does mistakes."
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At first glance, I’d say this is meant to portray the real-world in a game-world visualization. As a Soccer fan, I’ve seen lots of games that allow the player to review individual statistics about the players. This looks very much like the standard “player screen” of those games. It’s an interesting concept and I’d expect the intended audience to understand the metrics immediately.