2019 World Happiness Report: Visualization

By Michael Hung, Colin Au Yeung and Nathan Meulenbroek
Note: Works in Chrome, not test in other browsers

This visualization is intended to be used by a general audience for curiosity driven short exploration on standard desktop PC displays. Although the entire dataset includes entries by year detailing the values of various factors, this visualization is concerned with a subset of the data that omits these details in favour of showing the overall contributive impact of these factors on a given country's Happiness Score during the period of 2016-2018.

There are three components to the final implemented visualization: (1) the overall happiness score is shown as a function of a color gradient on a choropleth Mercator-projection map, which can be changed to a grid of hexagonal tiles (hex-tiles) that display the 3-letter codes for each country for easier identification by those unfamiliar with the shapes and locations of specific countries; (2) radial bar charts that break down the value of each contributive factor for a given country, shown upon clicking a hex-tile, which adds to/removes from (3) a stacked-bar plot for easier comparison between multiple countries and their overall happiness scores.

Our key takeaways from doing this project are predominantly meta in nature. Experiencing the iterative, inconclusive nature of design was incredibly valuable, as was developing the ability to use widely-accepted visualization mediums such as D3. From doing this project, we gained insights into considerations that can be used in further design work.