Stacked chart alternative

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Multiple bar charts — an insightful alternative that I recently discovered

Incremental Improvements #03: Stacked Bar Chart

Published in
3 min readApr 26, 2021

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This is the third post of the series about incremental improvements that can be done in order to make a visual design better. In each post, I analyze the data visualization to see what works, what doesn’t, and what to do to improve it.

In previous posts, I covered small multiples chart and bar chart usage. This time I’ll focus on stacked chart alternative and makeover the chart regarding the EU tourism published on the European Commission webpage.

% of the EU population participating in tourism by destination, chart showing data from 2018
Source: European Commission

The main obstacle of this chart is a comparison of the data. First of all, vertical labels don’t make it easy to read. Second of all, a stacked chart doesn’t use the full potential of the data, you can only compare the total participation in tourism and domestic travels across the countries. By looking at this chart, are you able to tell which country has a higher share of people having both domestic and outbound travels: Austria or Czechia? I guess it’s quite hard.

So what works and what doesn’t in this chart?

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Analytics Vidhya
Analytics Vidhya

Published in Analytics Vidhya

Analytics Vidhya is a community of Generative AI and Data Science professionals. We are building the next-gen data science ecosystem https://www.analyticsvidhya.com

Weronika Gawarska-Tywonek
Weronika Gawarska-Tywonek

Written by Weronika Gawarska-Tywonek

Data Visualization Designer | Trainer | Sociologist. Check my redesigned charts in weekly Incremental Improvements articles.

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