Explorations in Data Visualization: Counts by category per month, quarter and year
What’s the most effective way to tell this story?
3 min readJun 30, 2020
Given a table of data with this schema…
Our client wants to know the number of records grouped by category:
- Per month
- Per quarter
- Per year
How might we present this information in a visually concise and effective manner?
Round one: per month
Round two: totals for both axes
Round three: Re-label right-most total
Round four: insert quarters
Round five: More appropriately position each quarter
Round six: visually highlight quarters and year
Round seven: move year to the front due to its primary focus
Bonus round: easily compare counts amongst categories, and alignment clean-up
In some cases, the number of categories may be so high that it helps to add a way to compare a category’s value by some means other than mental math.
In such cases, bar charts help the eye, enabling a comparison based on length, not number.
But why keep them separate and force the client the headache of comparing by jotting his/her eyes back and forth?
Let’s combine them in an intuitive way!
Remember, our client wanted to know the number of records grouped by category:
- Per month
- Per quarter
- Per year
The monthly breakdown was easy.
We call particular attention to the year.
We include each quarter at its appropriate place in the chronology.
And we sweeten the deal with the addition of bar charts to help our client quickly assess which categories accounted for more or fewer tallies.
