Tidying up the details

This column chart caught my attention because of the color labels.

Well, it also concerns me that the chart takes longer to take in than you'd think.

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The color labels say "FY2123", "FY2022", and "FY1921". It's possible but unlikely that the author is making comparisons across centuries. The year 2123 hasn't yet passed, so such an interpretation would map the three categories to long-ago past, present and far-into-the-future.

Perhaps hyphens were inadvertently left off so "FY2123" means "FY2021 - FY2023". It's odd to report financial metrics in multi-year aggregations. I rule this out because the three categories would then also overlap.

Here's what I think the mistake is: somehow the prefix is rolled forward when it is applied to the years. "FY23", "FY22", "FY21" got turned into "FY[21]23", "FY[20]22", "FY[19]21" instead of putting 20 in all three slots.

The chart appeared in an annual financial report, and the comparisons were mostly about the reporting year versus the year before so I'm pretty confident the last two digits are accurately represented.

Please let me know if you have another key to this puzzle.

In the following, I'm going to assume that the three colors represent the most recent three fiscal years.

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A few details conspire to blow up our perception time.

There was no extra spacing between groups of columns.

The columns are arranged in reverse time order, with the most recent year shown on the left. (This confuses those of us that use the left-to-right convention.)

The colors are not ordered. If asked to sort the three colors, you will probably suggest what is described as "intuitive" below:

The intuitive order aligns with the amount of black added to a base color (hue). But this isn't the order assigned to the three years on the original chart.

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Some of the other details on the chart are well done. For example, I like the handling of the gridlines and the axes.

The following revision tidies up some of the details mentioned above, without changing the key features of the chart:

 

Comments

[Alex]

Horrible stuff. The fill should ideally be linked to the subject and also to the year. I suggest having a hue per subject and a saturation per year, with left-to-right orientation....although, that said, how about reorganizing into a simple stacked column layout?