Viz Makeover | Pittsburgh Stock Report

I'm a big fan of the Pittsburgh Business Times website and blogs as they provide great content on Pittsburgh businesses, and the articles are very well researched and documented.  My one complaint is that they're always publishing these slideshows that force me to click through dozens of pages of content to get the full story.

A couple weeks ago, they published a new slideshow outlining the 2014 stock performance of publicly traded Pittsburgh-area companies.  Again, I had to click through over 40 slides to get the story.  Throughout my clicking I was trying to remember who the winners and losers were, and I found myself clicking back to previous slides so that I could recall the performance of the different companies that I wanted to compare.  The slides have valuable content but it's almost impossible to compare the businesses using the slideshow format.

So I did a makeover.  And, you guessed it, I did it as a bar chart.

My version is an interactive display that lists the forty-five area businesses from best to worst performers.  I used some simple annotation to provide context and I used color encoding to indicate the different sectors.

In the end, I think my makeover offers an intuitive user experience and it's quite simple to view the results and make comparisons when everything is displayed on a single page.

Here's one of the "before" slides...

And here's a link to my bar chart makeover...