Makeover Monday 2024 Week 14 — Public Awareness Around Antibiotic Resistance
Makeover Monday is a weekly project where participants improve how they visualize and analyze data — one chart at a time. You can try your hand at this week’s and other challenges at makeovermonday.co.uk.
Here’s my thought process working through this week’s challenge.
The original chart
My thoughts on the chart:
- I think stacked bars with only 3 categories are fine, but depending on what you want to highlight, a different bar chart could be better for surfacing an insight.
- I’m sure the color palette goes along with original brand guidelines — but I think I would choose diverging colors to make either the correct or incorrect answer stand out more
- Overall the chart feels cluttered — I think some formatting could go a long way to making the chart look cleaner.
Making over the chart in Tableau
The topic is can viral infections be cured by antibiotics. Since the data relates to public health, I think it’s important to be deliberate with the color choices. I don’t like that grey is used as “I don’t know” — grey to me is a neutral color, and in this case coloring it as neutral could imply that being neutral on this issue does not have any consequences. So I’ll try first blue, yellow, and red for colors.
Next, I’m going to reference one of my favorite best practices articles — What to consider when creating stacked column charts by Lisa Charlotte Muth: https://blog.datawrapper.de/stacked-column-charts/.
In this case, I want to be able to compare the percentages more easily from a single baseline — so I’ll split out the stacked bars. I’ll also fix the axes on a scale of 0–100% so that the look is consistent across all charts.
I didn’t like how bold the blue, yellow, red combo looked, so I switched to a sort of teal green, yellow, and orange. To me green has a connotation of being correct, and yellow and orange are more warning type colors. To keep the viz less cluttered, I’m labeling the bars directly, and putting the color legend in the subtitle instead of headers on each bar. With some formatting, the final result ends up looking like this:
That takes care of this week’s Makeover Monday. Incidentally, I’m currently doing the #30DayChartChallenge, and this will also take care of the prompt for day 3 — Makeover. You can see the prompts below, and learn more about the challenge here: https://github.com/30DayChartChallenge/Edition2024
Curious about the colors I used? This week I used the MoMA O’Keefe palette, which is color blind friendly. It was developed by Blake Robert Mills, you can check out his work here: https://www.blakerobertmills.com/.
I’ve converted the palettes into Tableau friendly XML that you can add to your own preferences file, you can check out those palettes at this viz:
