Inspiration

Happiness is a universal goal, yet countries achieve it in very different ways. Inspired by the World Happiness Report 2024, I wanted to build a tool that lets people explore not only rankings, but also the deeper factors behind wellbeing.

What it does

Happiness Atlas is an interactive dashboard that:

Shows global happiness rankings and scores by country and region.

Highlights the happiest and least happy countries each year.

Visualizes GDP vs happiness (showing that money isn’t everything).

Lets users track a country’s happiness score trends over time.

Generates insights about surprising outliers and patterns.

How we built it

Built with Plotly Studio + Plotly Cloud using the World Happiness Report 2024 dataset.

Added filters for Country, Region, and Year.

Designed KPIs for global average, top country, and lowest country.

Created choropleth maps, scatter plots, and line charts.

Added an insights panel to highlight rankings and correlations.

Challenges we ran into

Cleaning and mapping fields from the dataset (GDP per capita, social support, ladder score).

Getting the scatter plot to balance readability (size = social support, color = region).

Ensuring the app remained visually clear and not overloaded with too many factors.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Built a clean, intuitive dashboard in a short time.

Captured both the fun angle (who’s happiest?) and analytical depth (why?).

Published the app live on Plotly Cloud for global access.

What we learned

How to use AI-assisted editing in Plotly Studio for faster iterations.

The importance of picking a dataset with human relatability — people instantly connect with “happiness.”

How storytelling turns a dashboard into something memorable.

What’s next for Happiness Atlas

Add demographic splits (gender, education, age group).

Include other wellbeing drivers (health, corruption, freedom scores).

Build a “Happiness Predictor” where users can adjust GDP, social support, etc., to see how it would change happiness.

Make the app embeddable on websites or blogs.

Built With

• plotly