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It's exactly because I had to build such things.

You can have pretty much as many things as you want in one dimension, but the other dimension has to be limited in turn, or people will get lost and confused.

If your users start to hold a piece of paper up to their screen to not loose their row you've failed as an UX designer.

Give them the ability to make sub-selections, and to reorder data. And compress the rest into interdependent interactive charts where selecting a data point in one, highlights the corresponding values in the others.



That's awesome that your suppositions work for your use case. But they are not universal truths.

Try comparing five Medicaid plans, in a method that is easy for people with an eighth-grade reading level to understand, that will also pass the scrutiny of three different government agencies.

Sub-selections, reordering data, and all the other things you list won't matter a whit.


Neither will an unlabeled grid with data values that you scrolled into and are lost in.

That MIGHT actually pass government scrutiny, but if anything that's a good metric for how bad government approval is of a metric.

Also we're not talking about 5 columns here, but about 50.

Good luck comparing 50 medicaid plans by continuously scrolling back and forth between them.

How does that not immediately evoke a cartoon-ish ridiculous scene in your mind?!




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