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Basically a bar-chart version of sparklines:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline

But it manages to actually show less information. Sparklines are nice because you keep the time axis so we know if the current metrics is improving or decreasing.

Otherwise just write the number.

2 comments

Or, in other words, nothing like a sparkline. This visualization is useful for gauge-like displays. Sparklines suck at communicating scale or proportion or context if the context is anything other than recent historical values. I could see a sparkline — or better yet, a simple yet properly labeled line graph -- complementing a bullet chart to show historical data. If something can effectively complement another thing, then they probably are not basically the same thing.

A lot of places I have worked at would love this to show a KPI in a simple manner, and they didn't care about the time axis and this type of slide was common:

    KPI #13

    2018: 124
    2019: 125 (A BIGGER NUMBER THAN 2018, YAY!)