The Western is a movie genre which tells stories set primarily in the later half of the 19th century in the American Old West, often centring on the life of a nomadic cowboy or gunfighter armed with a revolver and a rifle who rides a horse(Citation from Wikipedia). An article in The Hollywood Reporter on February 28, 2017 (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/shadow-superheroes-westerns-are-quietly-popular-971841) discusses the resilience of the Western genre across six decades starting from the 60’s to current day. In the article, the author publishes a plot of the year-by-year count of the number of American produced Western films with data drawn from Box Office Mojo(shown below).
This stylised stacked bar plot is hard to comprehend from direct inspection and requires additional effort in understanding what the plot is trying to convey. The ways in which this plot is confounding are,
- A stacked bar plot is used when the total in each category and their composition are relevant. It is great for visual aggregation of each category. In the above plot, however, all the stacked bars visually aggregate to the same total but are numerically different. In addition, each bar represents a particular year in each decade( the first bar represents year zero in all decades, the second bar represents year one etc.) which is not the information relevant to the article.
- The labels at the top of the plot appear to indicate the starting point of each decade but only hold true for the first bar. There are bars associated with a particular label that begin even before the labelling threshold.
- There is no effective display of information. It takes any user a little extra effort from their side to interpret the information being presented. Users expect a quick shot of the visualisation.
- The colour palette used in the stacked bar is a collection of small variants of one colour which makes it difficult to distinguish the composition of each bar.
- The time dimensions in the stacked bar graph has years of different resolutions changing in different dimensions, that is, years are increasing in single units vertically and in decades horizontally. Having one measurement unit increase in multiple dimensions at different resolutions only adds to the confusion.
Re-creating the graph: 
- Elimination of stacked bars: Grouped bars are preferred to stacked bars in this case because the aggregate information is not relevant to us. On the other hand, grouped bars allow us to compare data within a decade and across decades which is more useful.
- Clear Labelling: The decades are represented with crisp differential colours which make it easy for the user to quickly observe data of the decade they are interested in. This information in the plot is represented in a slick while detailed manner, with the labels on the data points making it more accessible.
- Time in one dimension: By grouping the bars, we are also ensuring that time as a measure stays in one dimension with changing resolutions(single years are represented as being parts of decades)
References:
- http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/
- http://1010wcsi.com/how-to-fix-each-of-the-7-mistakes-that-ruin-a-good-infographic/