One simple design fix for the Olympic medal tally

Every Olympics, the same old debate emerges: Should the table be ordered by gold medals, or total medals? For instance, while the official website uses gold medal order, the New York Times uses total medal order, as shown here:

This seems to vary by country, presumably depending on which ordering is more favourable to that country. Here in Australia, it's always gold order, and in the US, it's total order (very important to always be ahead of China!).

Gold ordering seems more correct to me because using the total counts a bronze as good as a gold, which it obviously isn't. However, I don't care that much about the Olympics or national pride, so I don't have much emotional investment in which ordering is more correct.

What I do care about is good intuitive information display. The most frustrating thing about looking at these medal tables is that one has to take time examining it to determine the sort order it's using - both sort orderings use the same column ordering.

All this could be avoided if these tables adopted one simple convention:

Make the column order the same as the sort order.

Consider the New York Times table above. The column order is:

country - gold - silver - bronze - total

But the sort ordering is actually:

total - gold - silver - bronze - country

So why not just lay the table out that way?

We can now read the sort order along the top. The primary sort column is on the left - the first column we look at. The data more naturally reads left-to-right (and top to bottom) like ordinary text. The effect has been enhanced with some subtle bars that illustrate the magnitude of the numbers within each column but also help convey the sort order. As we can see, the leftmost column is descending in magnitude.

Now for gold order.

Once again, the table flows naturally from left to right. The most critical column is leftmost. The column labels now not only describe individual columns but the nature of the table as a whole.

This particular sort ordering has some ties in the primary column - this is highlighted by removing the redundant numbers within tied entries.

Using sort order as column order means that the tied groupings can be easily seen this way, and for multiple levels of tie (such as with the 6-gold group) a tree-like structure emerges showing the various tie groupings.

This is useful not just for olympic medals, but for all sorts of table displays - I explore the example of an airport departure information screen here.