Harvey balls are round ideograms used for

visual communication Visual communication is the use of visual elements to convey ideas and information which include (but are not limited to) signs, typography, drawing, graphic design, illustration, industrial design, advertising, animation, and electronic resourc ...

of qualitative information. They are commonly used in comparison tables to indicate the degree to which a particular item meets a particular criterion. For example, in a comparison of products, information such as price or weight can be conveyed numerically, and binary information such as the existence or lack of a feature can be conveyed with a

check mark The check or check mark (American English), checkmark ( Philippine English), tickmark ( Indian English) or tick ( Australian, New Zealand and British English) is a mark (✓, ✔, etc.) used in many countries, including the English-speaking ...

; however, information such as "quality" or "safety" or "taste" is often difficult to summarize in a manner allowing easy comparison – thus, Harvey balls are used. In addition to their use in qualitative comparison, Harvey balls are also commonly used in

project management Project management is the process of supervising the work of a Project team, team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project initiation documentation, project documentation, crea ...

for project tracking; in

lean manufacturing Lean manufacturing is a methods of production, method of manufacturing goods aimed primarily at reducing times within the Operations management#Production systems, production system as well as response times from suppliers and customers. It is ...

for value-stream mapping and continuous improvement tracking; and in

business process modeling Business process modeling (BPM) is the action of capturing and representing business processes, processes of an enterprise (i.e. modeling them), so that the current business processes may be analyzed, applied securely and consistently, improved, ...

software for visualisation. Harvey L. Poppel is generally credited with inventing Harvey balls in the 1970s while working at

Booz Allen Hamilton Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation (informally Booz Allen) is the parent of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., an American company specializing in intelligence, AI, and digital transformation. It is headquartered in McLean, Virginia, in the Washing ...

as head of their worldwide IT consulting practice.

Implementations and support

Scalable Vector Graphics

The use of

Scalable Vector Graphics Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based vector graphics format for defining two-dimensional graphics, having support for interactivity and animation. The SVG specification is an open standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium sin ...

to render Harvey balls allows them to be easily used in

web browsers A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scree ...

and

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a ...

that support the XML vector graphics format. The benefit is that no special font is required and the Harvey balls can be displayed using an open format. The main drawback is that SVG is not universally supported.

Microsoft Excel

Harvey balls are available within

Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet editor developed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows, Windows, macOS, Android (operating system), Android, iOS and iPadOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a ...

since Excel 2007.

Custom fonts

Custom fonts have been developed such that the numbers 0–9 map to a particular Harvey ball. Incorporating the Harvey ball into a document then becomes a matter of selecting the number which corresponds to the desired Harvey ball and selecting the custom font. The Harvey balls can then be manipulated like any other font (e.g., color, size, underline) and may be easier to use than other implementations. The main drawback of this approach is that the font either needs to be embedded in the document or all the viewers of the document must have the font installed.

Unicode

The use of

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

to render Harvey balls depends on whether a font with these characters is installed; the Unicode Harvey balls may be difficult to work with in software that does not render these characters uniformly. The Unicode set of related symbols includes:

Modifications and other uses

From 1979 through October 2016, ''

Consumer Reports Consumer Reports (CR), formerly Consumers Union (CU), is an American nonprofit consumer organization dedicated to independent product testing, investigative journalism, consumer-oriented research, public education, and consumer advocacy. Founded ...

'' used a modified type of Harvey ball in product ratings and had even incorporated one into its logo. Some of the symbols used for Harvey balls are also used in other fields to represent other types of information:

References

* {{Wikidata-inline Pictograms Business terms Infographics Booz Allen Hamilton