I rarely find clustered bar charts to be enlightening. Take this one I recently came across in an article about Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood. Take about 5 seconds and see what you extract from it. Then scroll down.
Source: Crain’s Chicago Business
My guess is that you didn’t extract much. By the time you’ve read the title and figured out which colors relate to which geographic areas, your 5 seconds are up. Below is my makeover. Take another 5 seconds to review it and then scroll down.
I hope you at least got this from your 5-second review: Auburn-Gresham’s residents were much less likely to have a college degree than residents of the city/metro area in general. Here’s what I did:
Aggregated the groups into just two larger groups: those with and without college degrees. And I distinguished the groups with labels and colors. What makes a clustered bar chart confusing is the requirement to review multiple groups and compare the bars within each one of them.
Retained the subgroups but de-emphasized them so that they do not distract the viewer from the larger story. Each subgroup is represented by a shade of orange or blue and the exact percent of residents in each group is available on demand by scrolling over the bar segments.
Converted to a diverging bar chart to allow the viewer to more easily compare the size of the college and no-college groups.
Changed the title to a question to clarify what the viewer can learn from the chart.
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