The Well-Being Balanceboard

Inspiration

As global economies grow, happiness doesn’t always follow. We wanted to uncover how well-being indicators interact — asking why some nations achieve balance while others lag despite prosperity.

What it does

The Well-Being Balanceboard is an interactive dashboard that visualizes trade-offs between life satisfaction, income, employment, and social support using OECD data (2004–2024). It enables users to identify harmony patterns, explore correlations, and analyze inequality gaps across countries.

How we built it

We used Plotly Studio with the OECD Well-Being dataset, creating six key visualizations — from correlation heatmaps to income inequality bubbles. Data preprocessing ensured consistent numeric scales across 47 countries and 15 indicators. Interactive filters were added for country, year, and category to enable custom exploration.

Challenges we ran into

Aligning OECD’s multiple well-being dimensions (economic, social, health) across inconsistent country-year entries.
Ensuring performance stability for dense heatmaps and large categorical variables.
Managing correlation clarity — balancing information richness with interpretability.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Introduced a Harmony Score metric to measure balance between prosperity and well-being.
Designed a cohesive UI theme highlighting calmness and balance with modern gradients.
Ensured a seamless analytical flow, connecting heatmaps, scatter plots, and trends dynamically.

What we learned

I learned that visualization design is more than aesthetics — it’s storytelling. Using interactive filtering, we observed that higher income often correlates with satisfaction, but not uniformly across all nations — social support and employment stability play crucial roles.