Beyond Line Charts • Yao Yue • YOW! 2025

Yao Yue challenges the dominance of line charts in telemetry visualization, arguing that their time-centric nature and misleading interpolations often obscure insights. She proposes a 'form follows function' approach, advocating for visualizations tailored to the data's shape, the metric's type (e.g., step charts for counters, heatmaps for histograms), and the specific, often 'timeless,' operational questions being asked. The key is to transform time-series data into more flexible formats like panel data to derive clearer, more direct answers.