Proportional stacked bar charts are a good way of showing the size and proportion of data at the same time.

The SECRET to never choosing the wrong chart...the Bar Chart! Here are 18 options for your next bar chart.

Tableau tutorial and workbook here.

The gap in parental leave is extremely wide across all industries in America. 

How do only 23% of women get 14+ weeks of maternity leave? Why isn't progress being made to help dads take a more active role?

Check out the livestream recording and interactive viz below.

Wow! What a fun #WatchMeViz that was! I iterated through 16 charts and then when the idea solidified, there was some great conversation and feedback on the chat to help me get to the end. I find survey responses quite difficult to visualize, so instead of getting frustrated, I thought about all of the ways I can compare data to see if anything would work.

Most importantly, thank you to all of your on the live chat. It makes a huge difference to me and I love getting your feedback and questions along the way. You make me better. You can find the final visualization below the video.

For #MakeoverMonday week 45, we were analyzing the software and hardware units sold across several regions, as defined by Nintendo itself. The data was pretty simple. I started by doing some basic data prep to simplify the names of the fields and to pivot the data to make it easier to compare the years.

In this video, I will first review the initial visualization and talk about what works and what does. I then iterate through several methods for visualizing the data, hoping to find one that works well with this data set. With feedback from the viewers, I was able to create a bar chart that compares the percentage of global units sold of software vs. hardware for Nintendo.

I showed several methods for visualizing the data:

1. Line charts (several versions)
2. Stacked bar chart
3. Side-by-Side Bar
4. Tables
5. Scatter plot
6. Connected scatterplot

Resources:

1. Data Set - https://data.world/makeovermonday/2020w45-dedicated-video-game-sales-units
2. Final visualization - https://bit.ly/MM2020W45
3. Tableau Color Palette Generator - https://color.tableaumagic.com/
4. Colors from Image Tool - https://html-color-codes.info/colors-from-image/
5. ASCII character reference - https://jrgraphix.net/r/Unicode/27F0-27FF

Week 39 brought another #Viz5 topic, this time it was about children that are now 20-24 who were married under the age of 18. Child marriage is, of course, horrific and it's a violation of human rights. Unicef has done an excellent job of recapping all of the issues and why these marriages happen on their website here.

As I've mentioned before, I ALWAYS find these Viz5 data sets tought. I'm not sure why; perhaps I have a mental block on them now. This week the data set was three columns: country, female %, and male %. That can't be too tough...right?

Well, I sure made it tough. First, I joined the data to regional mappings from Unicef so that I could possibly look at the data at the regional level; I decided to use medians for each region in the end. Then I went into Tableau and built a bunch of charts to explore the data. I used chart guides to help me think through options and none of them seemed to make any particularly interesting insights pop out.

After about two hours of nothing, I got the idea of simply looking at the % of females that were married under the age of 18. I ended up with a simple bar chart, which turned out to not be too far from the first chart I created a few minutes in.

Here's the #WatchMeViz video and below is the visualization. Thanks to those that watched live and contributed ideas along the way!! It really helps knowing others are there encouraging me.

• Trump usually spends the first 5 hours of the day in Executive Time.
• He spends his mornings in the residence, watching TV, reading the papers, and responding to what he sees and reads by phoning aides, members of Congress, friends, administration officials and informal advisers.
• Trump doesn't take an intelligence briefing until 11am or 11:30am, and they only last 30 minutes.

What works well?

What could be improved?

What I did

What works well?

My Goals

• Clear sorting by very satisfied
• Sticks to their color guidelines
• Simple title

With the Olympics starting this weekend, I thought we’d take a look at the most classic way that people display Olympic medal counts, as stacked bars. Being an American, I pretty much have only known NBC as the host of the Olympics, so when I went to their website and looked for historical medal counts, I was mortified. This viz is just about as bad as it can get.

What works well?

• The countries are ordered from most medals to least.
  
• There’s cute little actions when you click on the medals.
  
• They used appropriate colors for each medal type.
  

Seriously, that’s all I see that’s any good. This is an incredibly poorly done graphic.

What doesn’t work well?

• There’s no title.
  
• There aren’t any tooltips, so I have no idea how big each bar is; I’m forced to guess.
  
• I can only see seven countries at a time, and I can’t even see the name of the seventh country. I mean, who would ever want to compare only the 15th-21st ranked countries?
  
• When I click on the scroll button, it scrolls by an increment of 2. Why?
  
• Comparisons are nearly impossible with a stacked bar except for the total medal count and bronze.
  

Here are some of the changes I made:

• I separated out each medal into a dot plot and chose to show only the top 25.
  
• I included a summary next to each country to provide the exact medals counts.
• I included a mobile view, but in this view I remove this summary for a better visual look.
• I included informative tooltips.
  
• I included a title so you know what the chart is about.
  
• I included filters so the user can decide which Olympic games to include.
  
• The "sort by" option allows the user to pick the medal count to sort by making comparisons easier.
  

Since Sunday is Mother’s Day in the States, this week’s Makeover Monday topic is about how many hours women work in various OECD countries. Let’s start by reviewing the original chart by Business Insider:

What works well?

• The stacked bar chart is relatively easy to understand since it only has four colors and there aren’t that many countries to compare.
  
• The chart is sorted by the smallest percentage of women working 40+ hours per week, which makes it easy to compare that category.
• The colors are easily distinguishable.
• Easy to read headers

What doesn’t work well?

• I have no idea what year this data is from. The data goes back to 1976. I assumed it was for 2016, since that’s when the article was written, but after finding the data myself, it looks like it’s from 2014.
  
• The title of the article "American women work way more than their European counterparts” isn’t entirely true. The chart doesn’t show all of the countries is Europe from OECD. The U.S. would rank 9th is you compare European countries and the U.S. from 2014.
• The chart title is useless.
• Japan isn’t in Europe, so why is that included?
• Why is the OECD average included if this is supposed to be the U.S. compared to Europe?
• There’s no rationale to the countries they chose to include. Is the author being deceitful on purpose? I hope it’s merely an oversight.
• While I don’t think this stacked bar chart is terrible, it does make it very hard to compare any of the other categories of hours worked.

The first thing I did was rebuild the chart including all of the OECD countries and reversing the sort to be by the highest rate of women working 40+ hours.

Click to interact

I included several filtering and sorting options to allow the user to find their own story. The user can scroll through all of the years and see how the story unfolds. This view solves the problem of not being able to sort by any of the other categories of hours worked.

I didn’t love this though, so I created a slightly different version that shrinks the bars and adds dots. Think of it as a stacked dot chart.

Click to interact

This is the beauty of Tableau. I can quickly iterate on ideas and see which one I like best. At first, I thought adding the dots would make it easier to understand. I think it looks pretty neat, but actually, I think I made it harder to understand.

The problem in both of these stacked charts is that I can’t see all of the years in one view. I was really curious as to the patterns. Has the % of women working 40+ hours per week in the U.S. grown? How does that compare to the OECD average? How do other countries compare?

With those thoughts in mind, I created this series of line charts across the different work hours ranges.

Click to interact

I love these types of charts. I created one last week as well. What I like about them is they include lots of context. In this particular example, I can clearly see that the U.S. is higher than the OECD average in the 40+ hours worked per week section. Yet I can also see that there are quite a few OECD countries that are higher than the U.S. I can easily compare Europe to North America. Or only look at the top 10 countries according to U.S. News and World Report. I can zoom into a specific working hours category with a simple tap on the filter.

I almost stopped here, because I think this already is much better than the original. However, I wanted to see of there was a better way to compare the different work hours within a single country. To address that, I thought a small multiples view might work well.

Click to interact

I chose to sort the countries by the highest % of women working 40+ hours per week in 2014. Then you read it in a z-pattern. So this view let’s you see where a country ranks amongst the others and you can also compare the hours worked within a single country.

Then it hit me. I quickly went to Andy Cotgreave’s blog and found this viz he created a few weeks ago:

Yes! This is it! It even matches the colors I was using. I duplicated the previous viz and changed it to an area chart. I then added some of the filtering options back.

NOTE: If you’re viewing this on a phone, you’ll see a long skinny version with less filtering and that also has the sorting option removed.

It took me five iterations, but I got there in the end. I’m not sure how I could have done this quicker with any tool other than Tableau. I love how I can fail fast! Which version do you like best?