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tilapios t1_jae50zm wrote

Reply to comment by smauryholmes in [OC] How American Express pays for it's attractive credit card rewards by joinkudos

It doesn't make sense at all. If we compare miscellaneous in the expenses column ($1.8 billion/5%) and processed revenue in the revenue column ($1.6 billion/2.8%), the miscellaneous bar is smaller even though it is larger in absolute dollars and as a percentage.

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joinkudos OP t1_jae6ih2 wrote

Thanks for the feedback. I had to scale down some of the data points to leave room for the text that clarified that some of the revenue items meant, so the bars are not exactly proportional. For instance in the scaled version (based on absolute numbers), merchant fees took up most of the right side of the visual, and processed revenue had limited space.

Hope you understand. I'll play around with better ways to scale to accomodate nuance like this in future.

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tilapios t1_jae9qj0 wrote

This isn't a nuance. This is the entire point of a data visualization. From this sub's rule on qualifying data visualizations: "A data variable must be transformed and mapped onto a visual property such as color, size, or position." If the bars don't scale with anything, they're useless, and what we're left with is a weirdly formatted table with random shapes attached to them.

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