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What is your recipe for a better life - a good education, clear air, nice home, money ?

There is more to life than the cold numbers of GDP and economic statistics – The OECD Better Life Index allows you to look across well-being in different countries, based on 11 topics that the OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of life.

OECD suggest that "there is a growing awareness that we must go beyond GDP and economic statistics to get a fuller understanding of how society is doing. But it is also crucial to zoom in on how life is lived. Where you live has an impact on your quality of life, and in return, you contribute to making your community a better place. Comparable measures of regional well-being offer a new way to gauge what policies work and can empower a community to act to achieve higher well-being for its citizens."

Metrics were gathered in nine topics – income, jobs, health, access to services, environment, education, safety, civic engagement and housing.

To me the OECD website is one of the best examples of visual story telling I have ever seen, take a look and you will quickly get emerged in the data without even knowing. OECD Better Life Index

When you use the website you are prompted to share your location so your local data can be displayed. Great visualisation but in essence bar chart formed into a circle , heh isn't that a radar chart ?

This got me thinking.......

Data for Greater London on the OECD Website

Using SAP Lumira:

The underlying data set used to is freely available so I thought why not take a look using SAP Lumira http://www.oecdregionalwellbeing.org/assets/downloads/OECD-Regional-Well-Being-Data-File.xlsx

As always the data acquisition from Excel was supremely easy, and the only data enrichments needed were around location to allow visualising data points on a map and a second set of measure objects with the Average aggregation.

After an hour or so it was very easy to put together this infographic

Something I had never used in the compose room is the preview feature, but I'm really impressed.

Up until today I had never used a radar chart, but linking this with the concept of small multiples really drew me in and visualised the data in a way I could browse and make comparisons easily.

(A small multiple (sometimes called trellis chart, lattice chart, grid chart, or panel chart) is a series or grid of small similar graphics or charts, allowing them to be easily compared. The term was popularized by Edward Tufte. Source:Small multiple - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia )

A quick storyboard.

The world as a whole

Where is similar to where I live?

Where should I consider moving to?

Geo-intelligence

And one more thing...

The selection of data visualisation, be it chart or table, is exceedingly important in aiding the end consumers understanding of the data story your are trying to tell.