Bad Chart Clinic: diagnose it, fix it, get your skill profile
Fifty flawed charts and dashboards. For each one you spot what is wrong, pick the redesign you would ship, then see the real fix. At the end you get a skill radar and a level, from Newbie to Master.
1. Diagnose
Tick every real flaw. Some options are decoys that sound plausible but are not problems; wrong ticks cost points, and ticking everything scores zero.
2. Choose the fix
Pick the redesign you would ship from four previews. One is best, others are partial or make things worse.
3. See the answer
Answers lock. You then see Before → After, the reason for every flaw, and the source page.
Choose a run
How scoring works
Teaching heuristic, not an exam. Each case is worth 100 points: 60 for diagnosis (each real flaw spotted earns its share; each decoy ticked costs 1.5 shares; select-all scores zero) and 40 for the fix (best 40, partial 10 to 25, harmful 0). Your radar uses accuracy per skill axis, shown with the number of items behind it. Axes with fewer than four items are marked low confidence. Your level depends on the average score and on how even your axes are.
The eight skill axes
Five levels
Inspired by the ideas in Storytelling with Data (Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, 2015) and The Big Book of Dashboards (Wexler, Shaffer, Cotgreave, 2017). All cases, data and explanations are original and fictional. Page references point to the PDF page of the relevant discussion. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by the authors or publishers. It is a learning aid built on our own reading of these ideas, so we may have misread or oversimplified them, and some references may be off by a page or two. Good design always depends on context, so treat the “right answers” as strong defaults, not absolute rules. Please read the books for the full treatment.