Yet another way to order pie slices

Someone decided to put this dataset into a pie chart, which purportedly leads to its effective communication. (Hat tip to long-time reader Aleksander B. for this example.)

Good news is that the order of labels in the legend aligns with that in the pie chart, so the primary challenge is down to finding the MRI slice. They are also using the convention of putting the "first" slice at the top and running the slices in a clockwise fashion.

Since I'm not a physicist, I can't explain why the categories are not ordered by value. Here is the text surrounding the pie chart:

Based on the caption of the chart, I guess that the order is determined by the values from prior years (not the 2025 data), and so when an item is out of order, it indicates that the ranks have shuffled. But your guess is as good as mine!

Aleksander, who reads this magazine, added:

What I am missing is the "message." I think the author just included the graph but didn't consider what main message he wanted to communicate.

Yep, that's why I have the "Q" corner on top of the Trifecta Checkup (link). A lot of data visualization projects can be rescued by clarifying what question the visual product is supposed to address.

A standard bar chart is preferred, with a much lighter cognitive load.

I like the following stylized bar chart that aggregates the categories into digestible chunks.

The market is roughly divided into two halves. The top half consists of just three industries (semiconductor, MRI and welding). The bottom half can be best understood as five groups each accounting for 10% of the total usage.

The first three of the five groups are lifting, lab and aero. (Aero is slightly less than 10%.) The next 10% can be subdivided into leak detection and other cryogenic, in a 60/40 split. The last 10% is evenly shared between three further uses.

The aggregation here is purely data-driven. If I have some domain knowledge, I'd respect natural grouping.