This post is not about Bump Charts. This post is about Barred Bump Sparkline. Inspired by the Stacked Bar Chart, Bump Chart, and sparkline, this chart aims to maximise space use by putting the Bump Chart in a sparkline format. Due to space, I think the bump chart cannot be fitted into a lengthy rectangle box easily, so I tried to tap into the idea of a Barred Bar Chart. Initially, I want to call this a Stacked Bump Chart/ Sparkline, but someone has used the name here first. Hence, the name becomes a play on the word "bar" in the form of a noun and verb.
This is a prototype of the chart below:
To read it, users can trace the item colour coded in green, yellow, and blue by tracing where the next box is. For example, Item Blue in Category 1 is ranked 2nd in Jan then 3rd in Feb and 1st in Mar. (I will suggest taking the date headers away to stay true to the idea of the original sparkline.) As can be seen, much space is being saved with a Barred Bump Sparkline. Next, the ranks of the items can also be compared across the categories. If it was a to highlight certain item, the following can be used:
On the other hand, it can be difficult if there are too many items to visualise and the colour need to be chosen with care for accessibility.
All in all, as crowded as the space of innovating new charts can be, it may interesting to see what happens if we put different charts together to develop something new.
