What do people do when they read grouped bar charts? It's amazing how little we talk about this super popular chart type. If you start analyzing them, you soon realize that reading them (properly) is really hard. What are you supposed to derive from a grouped bar chart? A comparison of comparisons? A comparison of distributions. Individual outliers? They are incredibly complex to parse without sufficient training or guidance (like with good annotations). What is your experience with them? It almost makes me want to study them in some kind of experiment. Has anyone studied them rigorously?
We studied how visualization students annotate grouped bar charts to tackle high-level questions about the data, breaking them down into tasks like retrieving values, filtering, computing derived values, finding extrema, and sorting. From their annotations, we built a taxonomy of five main annotation types: enclosures, connectors, text, marks, and color. Simple tasks like retrieving values and filtering were easy to annotate, but for trickier ones—like sorting or computing derived values—students often combined multiple annotations to make sense of the data. Here is the paper: https://doi.org/10.1177/14738716241270247
I prefer this method to a grouped bar (when not a static presentation anyway), easier to read and compare https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/petesime/viz/BarShuffle/Dashboard1?publish=yes
I despise grouped bar charts and recommend against them. There are better (more understandable) alternatives for every use. I literally can’t imagine a scenario when I would choose them.
I concur that they are hard to read, at least at a glance. I prefer stacked bar charts, as I feel that it is easier to compare the proportions between groups this way.
I’ve tended towards a tiled heatmap instead for these bivariate groupings. But I also have many categorical levels, sometimes small membership, which would be infeasible with grouped bars.
Both would gain from flipping the axis. And arranging the bars size-wise inside the group.
My experience is simple: ignore the mess; a simple heuristic: confused preenttation = confused analysis
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4 周IMO grouped bar charts are by far easier to read than other options (e.g., pie charts, cross-tabs, etc.). I can understand that the chart above is difficult to interpret. A little cleaning here and there would make it clearer. Firstly, I think the colors are redundant (since the bars are already labeled) and unnecessarily distracting. If you remove them, you’ll be left with just the bars, which allows you to easily highlight what you want your audience to see—for example, ‘Sedan vehicles are predominant in all cities?’ Also, consider sorting the data. While this may not be a perfect approach (depending on the audience and the question), it is generally the best option in this context. Lastly you should consider a horizontal bar as it would give you more space for better readability for “vehicle type dimension”