Posted by With Easter just around the corner, this week’s Makeover Monday challenge simply had to be about Chocolate. Andy initially cursed a bit when I made him pick an Easter-related set but given his love for chocolate he’s probably okay with it by now.
The original visualisation comes from CDA and features a ranking of the top 10 chocolate bars in different age groups in the UK:
What works well:
- Bump charts are fairly easy to read and interpret: the closer to the top, the better
- The legend explaining how to interpret the unconnected circles is very helpful and its placement at the bottom, i.e. close to the circles helps the reader
- The color choices are based on the wrapping of the respective chocolate bars and can help make the data more relatable
- Ordering the age groups in ascending order left to right
- Adding numbers in circles for each data point to indicate the actual value
- Labeling both sides of the line to show more clearly how positions change over time
What could be improved:
- There are too many colors in this viz, especially the numerous shades of blue, purple, red and brown
- The circles on top of the lines make the viz look busy. A more subtle design, e.g. by using lighter borders and grey colors instead of black, could work here
- What about under 18 year olds? Aren’t kids the most interesting age group to include to see how preferences change over time? Ad what about 25-34 year olds and those between 45 and 65? These obvious gaps in the data leave me scratching my head
- Across three age groups there should only be three data points for each chocolate bar but some bars have 5 or more ‘kinks’ or dots which is a bad way to display it
What I did:
- I spent a lot more time this week working on the book than on my viz, so it’s a fairly simple one
- the first thing I noticed is how popular Mars bars and Galaxy are (what the heck is Galaxy???), so I decided to work with that because I couldn’t think of a tidy way to work with ranks
- I chose a mobile layout because it is a small dashboard and why not make it mobile friendly…?
- I actually started this viz in PowerPoint but felt compelled to create a viz with actual data in it, so here’s my makeover for this week:
