Makeover Monday: Facebook's Footprint

6/05/2016 Matt Chambers 2 Comments



This week's Makeover Monday focused on Facebook's sustainability page. I wanted to tell the story of how Facebook is making an effort to make clean and renewable energy its top source of power.  First, I built a bump chart to look at the change in rank over time.


This view doesn't look bad, but it doesn't really show the magnitude of the energy usage.  This is something I realized after seeing a post from Steve Wexler pertaining to the visualization I had done previously on car color evolution.

So using Steve's post as inspiration, I decided to try to build something that would show the magnitude instead.  I came up with this view.


Click for interactive version

Now we can see the total usage over the time period as well as the trends in energy usage.  Using this view, we are able to show how clean and renewable has become the number one energy source, but we are also able to show the magnitude against the other energy sources.

I really liked this view, but I wanted to create a stacked bar version as well.  I was able to sort the energy sources by year within the stacked bar, and I came up with my final version.

Click for interactive version

I'm pretty happy with this view as you are able to see the total usage, the trends, and the magnitude together.

2 comments:

  1. Matt,

    I think the stacked bar works really well here -- I can see ranking and it's pretty easy to compare magnitude. I suspect it would be tricker if you were comparing 20 elements instead of five, but I will definitely add this to my arsenal.

    Steve

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Steve! I agree, five elements is probably the limit, but it seems to work. Thanks for your feedback and your blog post.

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