Width-Scale Bar Charts for Data with Large Value Range

Abstract

Data sets with large value range are difficult to visualize with traditional linear bar charts. Usually, a logarithmic scale is used in these cases. However, the logarithmic scale suffers from non-linearity. Recently, scale-stack bar charts and magnitude markers, improve the readability of values. However, they have other disadvantages such as various scales or several objects for visualizing one value. We propose the width-scale bar chart that uses width, height and color to cover a large value range within one linear scale. A quantitative user study shows advantages of our design - especially for reading values.