Visualizations : Home price index per state - March 25, 08 : Look at this interesting pattern

I remember well… it was 1997 and I’d found a nice apartment for sale in a good location on the Upper East Side. But, you know, prices had risen a lot in the past few years so I decided it was a bad time to buy. Today, I probably could not afford a closet in that apartment!

I imagine that an option for ‘fixed scale’ / autoscaling would be a relatively easy programming task and it would go a long way to resolving this issue – the user then has control ….
However, if the default is ‘autoscale’ it leaves open the possibility that people are blissfully unaware that a rescaling has taken place – since the visual picture changes, and the coloured graph is what attracts the eye, it is very likely that the change in the numbers can be missed – so a more sophisticted fix might include a popup which draws attention to a rescaling when it occurs – but I have no idea what that involves in programming terms ….
I hope that helps,
James