Back-to-back bar chart (also called divergent bar chart) is visually appealing and intriguing, I have to admit. Its shape is dynamic, capricious and unpredictable. It may look like a tree, a pyramid, a wave depending on the data set.
However, a bit shortcoming of this chart is that, it is not obvious to compare any pair of the back-to-back bars. Overcoming this will make the back-to-back bar chart a viable solution in many cases.
On 7/19/2016, the Viz of the Day or the original site is about population projection of a Swiss canton. It is based on a template from Prof. Dr. Ralf E. Ulrich's viz project. The prominent view is based on a back-to-back bar chart. It is very well designed: visually intriguing and full of information! The main problem I found is, the difference between man and women population is hard to see. And this difference is a very important piece of information.
So, I made some tweaks to remedy this problem. Again, bars in tooltips come to the rescue.
In summary, the tweaks I made are:
- changed the reference line gray scale to make the man and woman halves discernible, without changing the overall tone of the chart. Left: New; Right: Original.
- added bars in tooltips in the back-to-back bar chart to show the comparison between man and woman populations at every age.
- added action filters to highlight the view at a given age, or at a age group.
- added bars in tooltips in the summary table.
With the above tweaks, we try to bring out the information that was not so apparent to the viewers. Hopefully, this will make this chart type more useful.
Click images to go to the interactive version.
(Refresh the page if you want to view the gif image multiple times. Or go to Tableau Public and click the button at the top-right corner.)
The key idea is to float a semi transparent worksheet on top of the dashboard, where a help text box is strategically placed on top of each chart. This way, we can explain how to view each chart and what data points are important, etc. This worksheet is collapsible by a show/hide button.
Below I would like to show how this worksheet can be constructed.
1. Sheet with a single data mark.
- Double click the empty space in Marks panel and add two single quotes. Make the null pill a text label. This creates a single null mark.
- Set the view as "Entire View"
2. Create an show/hide button
- Go to the target dashboard
- Drag a floating vertical container to the dashboard, making it cover all the area of interest.
- Drag the Single Null Mark sheet and drop it into the above container. Hide the sheet title.
- Create an open/close button for the container and place the button at the top-right corner.
3. Add annotations
- Format the sheet background opacity as 70% in the layout manager
- Select area annotations and place them anywhere of interest.
- Write help text and format it to highlight important messages.
- The text can serve as functional guide and/or insight guide.
Here is an example. Feel free to download the workbook and explore. Click the "i" button at the top-right corner to view the in-place help.
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