Hi everyone, I’m working on a visualization for the 2019 World Happiness Report.
Here’s my Tableau Public link: [paste your link here].
I focused on showing the Top 10 Happiest Countries using a bar chart.
My question is: Does limiting the view to only the Top 10 make the story clearer, or should I include all countries? Also, do the color choices and labels make the chart easy to read?
Hello @Nairaah Butool and welcome to the forums.
In my opinion, the labels don't make the chart easier to read, because you don't have all of the labels. If you're going to label each bar, I'd make the chart taller, so they all fit, and remove the x-axis, because if I've read the value of 7.769 from a label, I don't need to trace down to the axis to determine that the value is "about 7.8" (so I'd also remove the gridlines as they would then not be serving any purpose). I think displaying 4 decimal places is two or three too many. While adding colour to dashboards can make them seem prettier, for me it actually detracts from the readability in this case. In your chart, I already have two much better ways of finding the value (the text of the label/axis, and the length of the bar), so adding a colour that is also just a representation of that value doesn't add any useful information. Initially, it makes me think that there is some sort of categorisation, because Iceland, Netherlands and Switzerland look like a group of 3 because their values are so similar, and I start looking for a legend to see what that group means.
I don't think I would add all of the countries, but I might consider giving additional context by adding a reference line of the global average. Then, it would be clear whether these countries are "extremely" happy, or just a bit above average. If I add every other country, I'd get a sense of that, but I'd have to mentally judge where the average is from looking at all of the bars - which is why I'd have a reference line to just show that average. Extending the functionality a bit, I might consider having a parameter to select a country, and also display that in the chart (so top 10 + selected country), so my users could see how a specific country compared, without having to scroll down to try and find them in a list in descending order.
