Packed Bubbles Visualisation of Power Plant Generating Capacity by Country

Visual Design
#1

Hello everyone,

I have created a packed bubbles visualisation with data from the Global Power Plant Database [1] using Tableau Desktop and was hoping for some feedback on my design.

packed_bubble
packed_bubble996×726 66.2 KB

Visual Design Type: Packed bubbles
Name of Tool: Tableau Desktop
Country: CHN, USA, IND, RUS, JPN, BRA, CAN, FRA, DEU, KOR, …
Year: N/A
Visual Mappings:
Data:

  • Label – country
  • Detail – country_long
  • Size – SUM(capacity_mw)
  • Colour – SUM(capacity_mw)

Colour:
Blue-Teal, 10 step colour

Unique Observation:
From this visualisation, we can see that out of the 10 countries with the highest generating capacity (listed above), 8 of those 10 countries are considered the top 10 countries by GDP [2]. This suggests that there is a strong correlation between how developed a country is and how much electricity they can generate.

Data Preparation:
No modifications to the original data

Questions

  1. Does the visualisation make sense and is the visualisation clear?
  2. Is the choice of colour appropiate?
  3. Have I selected an appropriate visualisation design?
  4. Is there any suggestion that I can further improve my data visualisation?

Sources
[1] World Resources Institute Global Power Plant Database available at: http://datasets.wri.org/dataset/globalpowerplantdatabase
[2] International Monetary Fund - World Economic Outlook Database (2017) available at: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2017/02/weodata/index.aspx

#2
  1. I think the visualisation does make sense and the data you are trying to show is obvious. I like how you have used tooltips so you don’t overcrowd the bubbles with data.
  2. The choice of colour is easy to interpret, and I can understand the colours without a problem. But have you thought about how would this look for colourblind people? Another palette could have been a better choice.
  3. Yes, I think the data is well represented and you can see how the weighting works.
  4. It doesn’t seem like you manipulated the dataset in any way. Perhaps something to improve on would be to challenge yourself with a more complex task?
#3

Visualization is clear and makes sense, however your size and color seem to do the same thing, I would advise using a color scheme for the circles to represent something other than the capacity, for example the primary fuel type.