Click the Original, Code and Reconstruction tabs to read about the issues and how they were fixed.

Original


Source: howmuch.net


Objective

The objective of the visualisation is to highlight how mortgage debt in the U.S. has changed over time.The visual is meant to support the headline of America’s Mortgage Debt Spiral Accelerates to All-Time High.

The visualisation chosen had the following three main issues:

  • Convoluted graph with spiral visualization which is hard to follow, while comparing the dots in a circle, the reader has to observe in different angles and visualize to compare the data set values.
  • Cannot appoximate the debit housing value for every year
  • Its hard to distiguish between orange and yellow dots for visually challenged people and the visual appearence does not look attractive as colour suits the objects related to grouping rather than following a quantitative variable which is used for comparison
  • It can be easily manipulated to give a false impression of a data set

Reference * howmuch.net Website https://howmuch.net/articles/mortgage-debt-outstanding-by-year

Code

The following code was used to fix the issues identified in the original.

library(ggplot2)
library(scales)
library(readxl)

mortage <- read_excel("Mortgage Debt Outstanding.xlsx")



debit <- ggplot(data=mortage, aes(x=reorder(Year, -debit), y=debit))+
  geom_bar(position="dodge",stat="identity", fill = "#990033", width=0.6)+
labs(
    title = "Total Mortage Oustanding by the Year in US", x = "Mortage",
    y = "Year")

Data Reference

*howmuch.net https://howmuch.net/sources/mortgage-debt-outstanding-by-year

Reconstruction

The following plot fixes the main issues in the original.