Redesigning three of Levvel’s Legacy Modernization Report charts: a data visualization exercise in novel chart types
The original charts do little to draw attention to the biggest takeaways
4 min readAug 10, 2020
Levvel recently published their Legacy Modernization Report
It features roughly 20 charts. For sake of exercise, I redesigned three of the first four that appear in the text.
Let’s inspect the first chart
Chart outlining a breakdown of companies by their reliance of legacy systems
- The percentages associated with each bar sum up to 100
- It is sorted oddly: largest group, instead of amount of reliance
- The bar labels are uncomfortably long and centered beneath their bars (plus margins)
- The biggest takeaway is buried in the left-hand paragraph, starting with “Research indicates…”
My redesigned chart
Chart outlining a breakdown of companies by their reliance of legacy systems
- The takeaway is ripped from the paragraph and placed prominently as the title of the chart
- Given the sum of 100, I opted for a waffle chart designed for this portion-of-a-whole dataset
- The order is now bottom-to-top 100% to 0% reliance on business-critical systems
- The title’s coloring mimics the chart’s coloring, further highlighting the two largest groupings in the dataset
- Labels are reduced to a single word and aligned to their respective chart baselines
Let’s inspect the second chart
Chart outlining a breakdown of number of legacy systems within an organization
- Use of color requires use of a legend for a chart with groupings of only two bars
- The last pair of bars (None) seems like it should appear furthest to the left
- The group bounds seems arbitrary. This chart is an over-simplified histogram.
- Each group’s bars are nearly even in height, except for the third. Still, it’s hard to compare upon a brief skim.
- The biggest takeaway is again buried in the left-hand paragraph, referring to the 26–50% group
My redesigned chart
Chart outlining a breakdown of number of legacy systems within an organization
- Again, the takeaway is ripped from the paragraph and placed prominently as the title of the chart
- The bars are replaced with a curved line to more clearly depict the majority within each category and how one compares to the other overall
- Light odd-even background shading retains the groupings
- The 26–50% group is called out with a red border for emphasis
- Color has been almost entirely removed
- Bold and italics are used to differentiate one group from the other
- Percentage label placement above and below the chart conveys which group accounts for a larger amount in that range
Let’s inspect the third chart
Chart outlining a breakdown of frequency of unplanned outages as it relates to the amount of reliance on legacy systems
- Again, very long labels adoring each set of bars
- Again, use of color requires a legend
- Surprisingly, the groups are in a logical order: from heavy to zero-reliance on legacy systems
- The combination of multiple bars and a separate legend demands a lot from the viewer to establish the important sales pitch underlying this chart: modern systems mean fewer unplanned outages
My redesigned chart
- Again, the takeaway is featured prominently as the title of the chart
- Use of color assists in quickly skimming chart, but is not necessary due to moderate use of well-positioned labels
- Bars are replaced with intentionally aligned points
- Two large circles are used to visually cluster both halves of the dataset and mark them as good and bad with respect to the point being made
- Four thin lines are used to orient each point within the larger range of data values
Below is a side-by-side comparison of all three charts.
This was a delightful exercise in finding the proper chart type for the purpose of helping the reader more quickly understand what the author wanted to share.
