The Hockey Stick
Another example of conditioned eye movement is the way audiences perceive and react to information. Through long experience with graphs and charts, businesspeople are accustomed to respond to what is known as the hockey stick, which expresses positive results moving upward to the right. A trend sloping in the downward direction implies negative results, and is therefore a counterintuitive movement.
If you were creating a graph to compare your company's results (sales, profits, product performance, or customers) against those of your competition, would you show it using bars like those in Figure 8.8?
Figure 8.8. The reverse hockey stick, going downward.
I hope not. Instead, arrange the bars as shown in Figure 8.9, upward and to ...
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