A Tufte-style take on an infomercial graphic

A few weeks back, I attended Edward Tufte's one-day seminar on visualizing information. The course is a great overview of his theories on designing effective charts, graphs and any other type of imagery needed to explain complex data. I'd recommend attending if you do any design work or process numeric data.

The next weekend, I spotted the informercial for the Ab Rocket Twister on a TV at a restaurant. The volume was all the way down, so I had only the visuals to sell me on this product. The messaging was mostly the typical nonsense used to sell home weight loss machines, though they included one particularly egregious graph:

Double muscle activity!

I'm seeing things through Tufte-colored glasses now, so I decided to see how the Ab Rocket Twister's sales pitch holds up when subjected to his six Fundamental Principles of Analytical Design.

1. Show comparisons. Well, we can see the Ab Rocket Twister generates 107% of the muscle activity of standard floor crunches. The text notes that's just over double, though the red bar looks to be about 3-4x as tall as the yellow bar. (3D helps muddy the waters.) Confusing matters further, "107%" apparently represents a 107% increase, or else it wouldn't be "double." 107% of 100 is only 107, whereas double would be 200.
2. Show causality and explanation. By itself, this image shows essentially zero explanation of why these results are obtained. There are two pictures of a man exercising (one for each method), but that doesn't tell you why you'll get better results.
3. Show more than one or two variables. We could assume that the experiments generating this data have controlled for other factors, but that's not stated. What about the possible effects of changing your diet?
4. Integrate words, numbers and images together. Words, numbers and images all definitely appear here. However, it's hard to argue it's an effective integration. The scale of the bars is definitely suspect, and the concentric circles at the base of the bars strike me as particularly ridiculous. What is that designed to show?
5. Thoroughly describe the evidence. Earlier in the commercial, it's mentioned that "university testing" generated this data. Unfortunately, there is a complete and total lack of information about how and where this testing was performed.
6. Ultimately, the message stands or falls on the quality and integrity of the content. Is this information true? Perhaps, but the word "integrity" doesn't exactly spring to mind, especially given the aforementioned errors and generally cheesy production values displayed in the rest of the commercial.

Overally, this is clearly a weak information graphic. But how could it be improved? When I've made design mistakes similar to these in the past, it's most often rooted in not having enough hard data in the first place. In that case, a heavily "designed," full screen visual simply isn't warranted.

We only see one number in this data set, so one idea worth exploring is what Tufte refers to as a single-number semi-table. That being said, I still don't think I'll be ordering an Ab Rocket Twister anytime soon.