Of the all the different types of charts out there that are overused, I’d be willing to say that radials are the most overused. And in Week 5 of #MakeoverMonday, we take a look at our first radial bar chart and it’s a doozy! Check it out below

What works well

• The title is simple enough and explains what you’re trying to look at
• The company logos are a nice addition to quickly recognize a particular company (only because you would have to turn your head to read)
• List of sources used

What doesn’t work very well

• The data:ink ratio is way out of whack
• Do you need to color by industry is there’s nothing to tie it back to?
• All of it is circular
  • the chart
  • the labels
  • the values
• The bubbles in the middle of net revenue get lost in the rest of visual

Radial charts are most often the WRONG chart type. Making comparisons between any two companies is very difficult. I don’t want to take up more characters talking about how bad this chart is so let’s just down to my makeover process and result.

First off, I think this is some interesting data simply because the data has been “humanized.” Meaning, it’s pretty difficult for the majority of people to be able to wrap their heads around numbers in millions or billions. But we can very easily comprehend a monetary value of a thousand dollars. And that’s what this dataset attempts to convey.

I feel like this was really close to being a perfectly acceptable chart type but they wanted more clicks and/or page views so they spun a bar chart around a circle for a simple “Ooh, cool” factor.

But what would it look like as a simple bar chart?

Well, that doesn’t look too bad actually. But default blue is kinda boring and I like the idea of coloring by industry. So let’s try that.

Yep, I like this. But as I mentioned above, I feel like this coloring needs a purpose. So let’s swap the dimensions from company to industry. But I don’t want to simply sum up the values since industry is equally represented and we can’t do averages because of outliers (Apple) so let’s look at median

Looky there! Even though Apple dwarfs the rest of the list, the banking industry is the leading industry even with 3 fewer companies in their domain when compared to Apple’s industry (tech).

I think I’ve got my story here. Check out my finished dashboard below, click for the interactive version.

So for the final product, I floated the industry visual in the bottom corner and added a background color for separation. I also added a highlight action for users to be able to see which companies make up each industry and their respective values.

Until next time!