[663e1b]

What's the advantage of an animated bar chart compared to an area chart? I personally think they're incredibly painful to look at but since I keep seeing them pop up on reddit I'm sure there must be advantages I haven't thought of, right?

[mbostock]

The alternatives I’d consider are a line chart and a bump chart.

https://observablehq.com/@d3/multi-line-chart https://observablehq.com/@jonsadka/scatterplot

A bar chart race is in many ways “worse” than a static chart. The bar chart race forces you to wait for the animation to finish, whereas a static chart shows you everything simultaneously, and lets you look forward or backward in time by just moving your eyes. This can be generalized to say that a well-designed static chart is often better than an interactive or animated chart, since in the static chart, everything is visible up-front.

But in the same way that a good visual hierarchy directs the reader’s attention and simplifies a complex interface, bar chart races (and animations more generally) are effective at getting the viewer to watch the race as it originally played out, from start to finish. Time in the data is represented as real time, so you’re only able to see a single moment in time.

So bar chart races are probably worse for most perceptual tasks, but as a storytelling device, they are (seemingly) quite effective.

[datasciencetext]

How do you feel about line "races"? (ex. https://datasciencetexts.com/diversions/college_ranks_race.h...)

[brootstrap]

Good thoughts here and also good post, always enjoy reading through a nice notebook. Also have seen the race charts popping up recently and it's cool to get a bit of a deep dive on it. Honestly though my opinion is that they are flashy and because of the animation and novelty factor people are drawn to the chart.

[zwkrt]

They’re engaging, which can’t be excluded from their benefits. There was something visceral about watching Apple pull ahead in 2011-2015.

IMO bar charts are better at showing relative sizes of scalar numbers as opposed to 2d shapes. A circle with twice as much area as another just doesn’t look 2x as big to me.

[datashow]

Line charts and area charts are not good when there are more than 5 series. The race chart can display 20 bars (more series can get in and out at any time), and you have a choice to focus on the top 5 bars, or one specific bar, or comparing two bars.

[liminal]

They are terrible to see an overview of change over time, but the animation keeps people interested and watching the "race"