When I reviewed the charts in the CPA Australia 2024 Annual Report I found another series of charts that could be improved.
In the image below we can see the last three year’s satisfaction scores have been plotted. This was on page 43 of the report.
You can see the report at the link below.
Again, this chart is hard to read as the years and numbers are all vertical. Also quoting 2020 and 2021 scores as values only doesn’t help comparisons over time.
Sparklines
Using different colours for years is redundant as the years are labelled. I thought a better use of colours was to identify the high and low scores.
I have used Excel Sparkline charts which have high and lows as standard chart features.
In the image above I have plotted all 5 year’s results. The high scores are shown with a black column and the low scores with an orange column. Blue columns are the other scores.
Scores overall were consistent across the years. A low score is just a bit less than a standard score and high score is just a bit more than a standard score. You can see the spread in the heatmap chart example at the bottom of the post.
You can see Hong Kong had a tie for their high score.
Timing
Plotting the highs and lows this way highlights that most (7 out of 10) of the lows occurred in the last two years. Indeed, half the regions (5) has their lowest score in 2024. This was hard to spot in the Annual Report chart.
The high scores had 4 out of 10 occur in the last two years. The UK and Other had their high and low in the last two years.
The Annual report chart was hard to read and even harder hard to identify the lows and highs across time.
Sparklines are great for time-based analysis and easy to create and have plotting highs and lows as a built-in option.
Heatmap
You can see the scores don’t vary much in the heatmap below. High cells are shown with a blue fill and low cells have an orange fill. A white fill means the values are in the middle.
The difference between the lowest score 6.6 and the highest score 8.13 was only 1.53. Interestingly both the highest and lowest values were in 2024 and they were outliers.
Note: All the scores for Australia were in the low range compared to the rest of the world. Whereas all Mainland China scores were in the high range. The UK had their highest score in 2023 followed by their lowest score in 2024. Australia had the same happen in 2022 and 2023.