here's what *really* happened

Last month, we challenged our community to tell the story behind the story—instead of relying on possibly misleading summary statistics to communicate a message, we asked to see a visual that would explain the components of change. Three dozen of our members answered the call, contributing a fascinating array of stories and interpretations of our challenge. While a selection of contributions is highlighted below, this was one of those months in which every single entry offered an interesting approach, execution, or both, in their effort to reveal the explanations for an element of change. So, make sure to visit the community and browse the whole collection!

An esoteric task elicited esoteric chart types

When we introduced this challenge, we offered some examples of visuals that might be well-suited to showing aggregate change, but not necessarily the components of change. As their solutions to this problem, some of our contributors turned to some lesser-known chart types, which worked well in telling their chosen stories. 

Jozef used a candlestick chart, commonly found in stock market reporting, to represent the change in an organization’s headcount over time. Andrea created a tornado chart, which resembles a diverging horizontal bar chart, to illustrate the steps taken by (notional) restaurants to survive 2020. 

Robyn combined a simple line chart—showing the summary change—with a much more complex streamgraph, to show not only how often she used her mobile phone, but also what apps she was most likely to be using. (Spoiler for the question of “what apps:” WhatsApp.) Stephen used a different type of flow diagram, the Sankey chart, to show the change in headcount at a company over time.  

Katy tackled a complex story with multiple variables in a notably clever way: she used a connected scatterplot to compare the frequency of Google searches for “beauty” and “mental health” over time, and added annotations along that timeline containing essential context about the growth and popularity of Instagram. Rob also created a connected scatterplot, but applied it across multiple panels of a small multiple chart, giving us a view of the changes in life expectancies vs. fertility rates around the world.

When in doubt, use words

One way to be confident that your audience will understand your graph’s intended key takeaway is simple: write the key takeaway on the graph in words. Too often, we think our charts or our data will “speak for itself” or be self-evident. Why leave that up to chance? If we use our words, we can tell much more nuanced stories than data markers on an XY coordinate chart ever could.

Several contributors used words to explain the change this month. Remi showed how the popularity of the baby name “Diego Armando” rose and fell in Argentina over time by using a line chart, and annotated key dates with events in the life of the late footballer and national hero Diego (Armando) Maradona. Marisa created a scatterplot that compared cell phone ownership vs. internet usage in Indonesia over time, and annotated key years with information about government interventions that drove changes in one or both metrics. 

Charles used a significantly greater number of words in his visualization comparing two Canadian ports’ respective volumes of activity vs. the timing of a worker strike at one of those two ports; his multi-screen view gave users the chance to investigate additional geographic and temporal context, all of which was explained in words. Similarly, Gary used long-form storytelling for his submission about the decline of Christian belief in the United States; he started with a simpler overview of the decline, and then added additional levels of granularity, investigating possible drivers of that decline, for the reader to see as they progress farther down the page.

Whoa, what was that? The power of animation

In a static visualization, color is probably the most attention-getting quality we can leverage; in a dynamic visualization, it’s movement. A couple of this month’s submissions used animation to both get our attention and explain underlying aspects of the main story: they explained the change by using a literal visual change. Simon used animated transitions to tell a story about passengers on the Titanic, reorganizing the visual into various configurations in order to emphasize different demographic divisions, while Phil created an animated line chart to show how the history of change in the NASDAQ can look volatile or smooth, depending on how granular a time period you use to visualize it.

Pixels are free: use multiple charts

As a comic book might use multiple panels of different shapes and sizes to tell a story, so too can our visualizations. A multi-panel approach gives us the chance to talk about the same topic at different levels of detail. Zsuzsanna used this to great effect in her explanation of the variance effect on sales of chocolate Santas at her notional confectionary company. Line used a similar approach with a look at whether climate change will bring more rain to the UK; I particularly like the visual effect of the filled/overfilled bars representing more water. Finally, Monica used a line chart to show the percentage of deciduous trees bearing leaves throughout the year, but also used a stacked bar graph to show what color those leaves would be in any given month; while we don’t often advocate for the use of multiple colors in a stacked bar graph, this is the perfect use case for it!

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the November challenge. December’s challenge, critique then (re)create, is live now, and submissions are pouring in already. We hope to see yours as well!