The Neck Twisters you should avoid

Incremental Improvements #02: Bar chart usage

This is the second 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 the first post, I covered the small multiples chart done by The Economist. This time I’ll focus on the chart I found in one of the reports a long time ago.

You probably see similar charts in many reports or presentations. The chart is not the worst but it is definitely painful to look at — quite literally I would say. This is a great example of misuse of column charts that I like to call the Neck Twisting chart. Long and vertically oriented labels are hard to read and do cause pain in your twisted neck.

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

What works? ✔️

• Keeping categories order — education level is an example of ordinal measurement and therefore should be presented in the natural order.
• Using grouped chart — the main reason of this chart…