1. Advanced visuals
Amazing effort! We are going to look at more advanced chart types and see how they build upon simpler concepts. Lets jump in.
2. Limited offering
These two bar charts show the total revenue by source type (gift shop, ticket, and cafeteria) and overall sales for each museum in a group. We can see that ticket sales dominate the revenue and that the museum of contemporary art has a slight edge over the museum of photography for the highest total income. But what if we wanted to know more, like comparing how ticket sales for a specific museum stack up to sales for another? The basic bar chart limits us only to display one category at a time.
3. Stack it up
The stacked bar chart is an evolution of the traditional bar chart. We can compare more information and highlight additional insights by adding a second categorical variable. With a stacked bar chart, we can combine the previous two graphs into one, giving us a detailed look at each museum's revenue. The added color dimension allows us to differentiate between the sales types. This single combined graph shows more than the two separate graphs.
We can see that breakdowns of income sources for museums look very different. The contemporary art museum for example gains more revenue from its gift shop than its ticket sales. The museum of modern art's cafeteria is greatly underperforming compared to the other three. A solid visual engages us and makes us want to know more about our dataset.
4. Stretch it out
There are variations on the stacked bar chart as well. This version, known as the 100% stacked bar chart, scales the data from each museum so we can compare what percentage each sales source represents for each museum. So instead of looking at the raw amount of money each source brought in we are comparing the share of the total income for each source within the museums. We will be able to see if certain areas are under or over performing compared to the others for each musuem.
Interestingly, we previously flagged the museum of modern art as having a severely underperformed cafeteria compared to the others. However, with this new perspective, the modern art museum’s cafeteria is somewhat close to the photography museum based on the revenue share.
The museums’ decision-makers could use these interesting outcomes to launch additional investigations and find areas for improvement.
Modifying visualizations for your needs can help find more insights. Many variations of the core chart types exist so give a few a try next time you want to visualize something new and see how they work for you.
5. Different strokes
However you decide to visualize your data, it is always important to remain flexible and try many approaches and see what you uncover.
Our stacked bar chart showed up which individual museums performance compared to the others and how gave us a rough sense for which area of the museum was responsible for the overall performance.
We were then able to narrow our focus to compare the relative performance of each revenue source between the different museums and highlight the differences more easily.
Both graphs achieve slightly different goals and are useful for different audiences. It is up to you to remain curious and explore your data in new and interesting ways.
6. Let's practice!
Let's regroup for a moment with some exercises on leveling up our visualization toolbox.