Analysis

Analysis of a Data Visualisation – Top 500 Passwords
Design & Concept: David McCandless
Code & Additional Design: Omid Kashan

What story does it tell?
This data visualisation reveals various aspects of 500 of the most popular used passwords and asks you to see if yours is there.

How does it tell it?
It tells this story by sorting the passwords into a range of colour-coded categories and then arranging them on a scatter plot with the axes “Popularity”, “Rank”, “A-Z” & “0-9”. The strength of the password is shown by the size of the text itself. For example the bigger the text, the stronger it is, making it harder for hackers to guess the password.

Does it allow for different levels of interrogation that can be seen or used on the part of the reader? For example, can they drill down to discover more detail?
This visualisation allows for some interrogation, in that you can filter by the 11 categories and make comparisons that way, by clicking on the different categories but because it is such a simple concept this is about the extent of it. It gives you the opportunity to compare only 2 categories or all 11 of them if you wish. They have also included a bar chart that shows you the percentages of the top 500 passwords used.

Are you able to create multiple stories from it? If so, what are they?
The data in this visualisation is very basic and straightforward. As a result, the only stories that can be taken away from it are those that are directly referred to, such as the popularity, rank of the passwords, strength of the categories by size and the passwords within them. The bar chart creates another story by showing us the percentage of how popular the passwords are in their categories and Name is the most popular with 36%.

What can you say about the visual design – layout, colour, typography and visualisation style?
Overall, this visual design of this data visualisation is as basic as the data itself. There are very simple, sans-serif typefaces used throughout and the colours are all quite muted which is quite nice. I just wish the yellow were more of a muted colour as it stands out too much against the other colours. The scatter plot makes sense to plot the popularity and the rank in alphabetic order but when you see all the categories together it is a little confusing, but makes more sense when you click and compare a few categories. Although it appears slightly dull, it does make for a harmonious and consistent result.

What improvements would you suggest?
Although it’s a simple visualisation, there are a few things that could be changed to improve its usability. Firstly, there isn’t enough distinction between some of the colours of the categories, e.g. “Password/Access”, “Sport” and “Truly Random” are barely distinguishable. Also more interesting conclusions could be drawn if the axes were changed. Rather than having “Popularity” and “Rank” on the Y-axis and “A-Z” on the X-axis, it would be interesting to compare “Popularity” with “Password Strength”, which is currently shown by the size of the text. It’s such a chaotic graphic that sorting the passwords alphabetically doesn’t seem necessary.

In addition to the scatter plot, there’s a bar graph that shows the popularity of the categories themselves. There are two main issues with this. The first being an inconsistency with the colour of the “Truly Random” category. In the first graphic is it orange, whereas here it appears black. Also, the percentages are only shown on three categories, when it would be easier to compare them if they were shown on all of them.

In regards to the colours they chose, the muted colour palette is a nice choice as it has a consistent and harmonious result but the yellow stands out against the other colours so they could have shown the strength with bolder colours rather than the size so it looks neater on the scatter plot.

Where does the data come from? Comment on its source.
The data comes from a Google Document which compiles data from a range of sources. Some of the source links don’t work so it is possible the data isn’t completely reliable.
Sources: data breaches, Xato.net, TroyHunt.com
Data: http://bit.ly/KIB_Passwords