I totally agree with pushing the analyst to determine what the real message is. Often, as you say, they think that every category and data point is important for the audience to see. The reality is that the audience cares about what they need to know in order to make the important decisions they are tasked with making. If we want to get this example truly focused, then we could just show the dramatic increase in the “Very” percentage from before to after and not show the other categories at all. This freaks out so many analysts because they think the audience cares as much about every data point as they do. The reality is that a decision maker sees that dramatic increase in a measurement that is important to the organization and can easily make the decision to continue to support the education initiative. When presenting the results of analysis, the primary focus should be on what the audience needs, not trying to cram every number in.

Good to hear from you, Dave! I’ve placed stacked bar charts on the same baseline as you suggested, too. These charts are always so challenging to read so I usually push the chart’s creators/analysts to focus viewers’ attention on just a slice of the information with saturation (the second example here) or to combine a few of the categories together (a later blog post). Or, if they’re sure that every single exact category is equally important, then a table (or heat table) tends to be easier to read than a squished stacked bar chart.