This afternoon I received a bunch of data accompanied by stacked bar graphs for each dataset. For example, this one:

The chart shows the incidence of disease X in various age ranges. That incidence is split by 8 severity levels. The chart shows that the disease especially affects age ranges 4 and 5, at different severity levels. However I didn’t feel comfortable …

• what are the different levels of severity in age ranges 1, 2 and 3?
• how can we compare levels C, D and E in age ranges 4 and 5?
• is there anywhere some severity A?
• (it’s even worst when some age ranges don’t have any incidence at all: what is happening?)
• etc.

I looked on the web but couldn’t find much information apart from the fact “The Economist says they’re so bad at conveying information, that they’re a great way to hide a bad number amongst good ones” (but are still using them in their graphic detail section) or “a stacked column chart with percentages should always extend to 100%” (this doesn’t really apply here). Then in a post on Junk Charts, someone mentioned Steven Few who would have said “not to use stacked bar charts because you cannot compare individual values very easily and as a rule [he] avoid[s] stacked bars with more than six or seven divisions”. And Steven Few also participated in his forum here.

This reminded me I read a book written by Steven Few, a few years ago: Information Dashboard Design (O’Reilly Media, 2006). Inside, on pages 135-136, one can read stacked bar graphs are the right choice only when you must display multiple instances of a whole and its parts, with emphasis primarily on the whole. And that this type of graph shouldn’t be used if the distribution changes must be shown more precisely.

If one wants to clearly display both the whole and its parts, Steven Few recommends to either use two graphs next to each other or a combination bar and line graph (with two quantitative scales).

As I’m not really interested in the whole but mainly in the parts and their relative distribution, I suggest another way to present the data. This isn’t really new. Actually everything was already in the table. You just format the table nicely and add some colour gradient. And voilà:

You still see where the incidence is the highest (in age ranges 4 and 5), what levels of severity are the most important (C, with lower but approximately similar levels of D, E and H). In addition to the graph above, one can notice there isn’t any severity levels A, B, F and G represented and we can quickly grasp the proportions between the different incidences.

Of course, if your criteria for “sexiness” is that there shouldn’t be any digit on your chart, then this chart is not sexy. But I find this presentation really more appealing and meaningful than the stacked bar graph. Isn’t it?