In a previous article, I shared my experience of creating a visualization every week since 2018 – I now have over 350 in my Public picture Profile! Unsurprisingly, out of all the visualization types, I've used bar charts and line charts the most. They're simple but very effective and intuitive for telling stories. However, sometimes I get bored making similar charts over and over again, and they may not show complex data patterns.
In this article, I will introduce seven less common but powerful types of visualization. I'll talk about their specific use cases, share my visualization examples, discuss their strengths and weaknesses, and show you how to build them in visualization tools like Tableau.
A bump chart is a special type of line chart that visualizes the change in the rankings of various categories over time. Its y-axis is the category rankings, so it shows how categories “push” each other up and down over time. It is therefore perfect for demonstrating competition between categories.
