Stacked Bar Chart – Bad Loans [Chart Review]
This chart clearly shows the reason why I dislike stacked column charts. When I first look at this chart, I want to know how much the two individual series impact the change of the whole. In the chart below, there is no way to quickly tell if the yellow segments of the last three or four columns increased, decreased or stayed the same.
Of the flip side, part of the goal of this chart is to show the total percentage of all loans, which is the total height of each column. I typically think line graph whenever there is time across the x-axis, but these columns are okay too. I can think of a few different options to enhance this data visualization.
- Simply add the values for both series to the middle of each segment in the column.
- Create a chart using 3 lines. First line is the 90 Days or More Past Due. Second line is the In Foreclosure data. Finally, the third and last line would be the total for both segments.
- The last method would be to try an area chart showing the total and including two lines to show each segment.
[via BusinessWeek]
What option do you think would be best? Or, is there another option that would work better?
June 24th, 2009 at 6:30 am
[...] the one below featured in excellent periodicals like BusinessWeek. As I said in a previous post, I really dislike stacked bar charts, ESPECIALLY when time is on the x-axis. To help [...]