Today’s post outlines an alternative approach to using a funnel to visualize a process and related data.

You’ve likely seen funnels like those shown below. The intent is to show how something—customers, products, sales deals—passes through a series of stages until some desired action—conversions, purchases, views—happens. With this overview, you can help others understand the process with a visual representation.

While the funnel can be effective at showing a summary of the process, they are not particularly effective when it comes to measuring that process—and how each stage compares to each other in size. Why? Because a generic funnel doesn’t encode the metric it represents.

Let’s look at a specific example.

Imagine you are an HR analyst in a large organization. A new senior leader is coming up to speed on the recruiting process and related metrics. Your teammate put together the following slide for an upcoming meeting. Spend a few moments studying this visual. What observations can you easily make from this slide? What questions do you have?

Let’s first focus on the funnel. I can easily make one broad observation: there are 50 applicants for every 1 hire—and that applicants pass through three stages in between. As I start to intake the volume of applicants in each stage, now it starts to feel like work. I have to mentally picture (I’m a visual learner; others may be processing this differently) 50 applicants going to 17 applicants in the CV review stage, and so forth. This is more effort than necessary if I’m simply desiring to understand where the volume is concentrated. If my audience is a senior leader, I don’t want them to have to work to get a relative sense of the numbers.

Let’s look at the supporting text at the bottom of the visual. This helps provide a sense of the volume of interviews conducted but it leaves me wondering so what? Is this indicative of a successful recruiting operation that meets organizations overall hiring needs, or is it a call for action for a better process or more staff? Let me offer one approach to transition from putting numbers and pictures on a slide to creating an integrated visual to more quickly impart understanding.

Instead of the funnel, we could utilize a square area graph. For reasons outlined in the current #SWDchallenge, we don’t use a lot of area graphs. They’re ink-heavy and our eyes aren’t great at comparing areas. However, in the use case where you’d like to communicate numbers of varying magnitudes, a square area graph gives us an additional dimension: the width of a square (in contrast to a bar chart, where we only have height or width). The second dimension of a square area graph allows us to visualize more information in less space.

Check out the difference between the funnel and the same data visualized in a square area graph below. Each square represents an applicant and the volume of applicants in each stage is encoded by color. This design allows me to see the number of applicants in each stage.

NOTE: Alternately, I could have designed my graph with 100 squares and rescaled the numbers so they could be expressed as relative percentages. However, I intentionally chose to use 50 squares and keep the same volume of people in each stage to emphasize the flow to make 1 hire.

Next, let’s turn our attention to answering, “so what?” My redesign of the slide might look similar to what you see below. I can use the square area graph—paired with the supporting context from the original slide—to achieve the desired outcome. Our senior leader has to do less work to understand what is being communicated.

In conclusion, a square area graph can be an alternate choice for a funnel when you want to visualize and compare numbers along different stages of a process. You can download the accompanying Excel file to see how I created this visual.

See the following for additional examples of square area graphs:

Have you seen instances of funnels used effectively? Leave a comment with your thoughts. If you’d like to try a more traditional area graph, flex your data storytelling muscles with this month’s #SWDchallenge.