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Visualizing Travel Markets

Updated: Sep 13, 2018

I participated in the this month's Storytelling with Data challenge (#SWDchallenge). The goal of this month's challenge was to remake this graph:



The title of this graph tells the viewer a story, but the data doesn't easily explain the story the author was trying to tell. After reviewing the data, I made a few changes to improve the clarity of the data and therefore the story being shared in this graph. Here are the changes I made:


Change the chart type

This visualization is attempting to show change over time and a pie chart isn't necessarily the best way to illustrate that change. So I chose to use a slope graph to show the changes between 2000 and 2016. A slope graph captures change between two points, but doesn't show any variation that occurred between those two points. Because this data is only comparing travel markets in 2000 and 2016, a slop graph works. If the author was trying to show the change in travel markets with data points throughout those sixteen years, a slop graph would not be the right chart type to illustrate that story. I used Excel to create my slope graph.


Use color to interpret the graph

Because the title of this chart is already telling a story about the data, I use color to highlight this story more clearly. I also use color in my title to draw the viewer's eye quickly between the thesis of the graph (the title) and the chart. While I kept all the data in the pie charts in my version of the visualization, I put data points that are not crucial to the story in grey.



Here is my version of this data visualization:


For more information about the Storytelling with Data September Challenge, click here.

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