World Happiness Report 2020
view on Google Data Studio - data source info
About this week's data
This week's Makeover Monday dataset comes from Gallup World Poll and the World Happiness Report. Citizens of 153 countries around the globe were asked:
On a scale from 1 to 10, how happy are you?
The report looks at this data, alongside a variety of factors that contribute to a population's happiness.
My visualization
The original report shows the data in a series of stacked horizontal bar charts. I wanted to keep an element of this, but simplified onto a cleaner and more modern look. To achieve this, the interactive version of my visualization filters the contributing factors by country, and displays the data in a 100% width stacked bar. I love the look of the fixed width bar!
However, I wanted the main feature to be the one thing that I felt the original visualization was missing - a heat map! I thought it would be interesting to see not only the scores of each country, but how countries of similar scores were grouped together in certain regions, as well as any instances where there were stark differences in neighboring nations.
And then, of course, I had to put my personal stamp on everything with bright colors and fonts that fit my aesthetic. That's always one of my favorite parts!
In this case, I worked with one of Google Data Studio's pre-set palettes for the map colors, then used conditional formatting to apply the same colors across other items.
The stacked bar has the same starting and ending colors as the map (inverted left-to-right), with a spectrum of other colors in between. I used a different color scheme here to provide a visual cue that the data represented in the bar is different, and therefore contains different colors than the map. Anchoring the ends of both spectrums with the same colors gave the two different palettes a cohesive look.
Observations and conclusions
There are definitely a few things that bug me a little bit about this visualization - both design issues as well as weird functionality issues - that I can't do much about because I'm at the mercy of Google Data Studio's available options. One of these days I need to learn Tableau Public so I can take advantage of its much more advanced design capabilities!
For my first Makeover Monday I am really really happy with how it turned out! I had a lot of fun playing with the data and I'm definitely looking forward to doing many more of these in the future!