Introduction of the topic

It was an interesting procedure for me to explore the topic that I want to visualize in the Lab last week. In the beginning, I was unsure if I can find any data related to Asian’s occupations around the world, and it is true that sometimes it is hard to look for specific data’ files. As a result, I considered another topic for this visualized work. I want to show a world map to indicate the Tourist/visitor arrivals and tourism expenditure on each country, and it can be observed about the Tourist’s industry trend in each country. Therefore with this ideal topic in my mind, I found the data in the United Nations that shows the travel expenditure in many countries from 1995 to 2015. According to the world map result, I want to create, I found the two map examples of visualizations on the websites. This is the visualization (Image 1) showcases the places you can afford to buy the house in England and Wales by analyzing your salary and year. I like the way it shows the affordable houses by using effective colors. Users are simply to enter the salary and pick the certain year to investigate, and later the results of affordable houses’ locations will be shown in this map. What I learn from this example is that I can indicate the travel expenditure of each country by colors. Furthermore, I do hope my visualized map not only shows the result from each country but also create a bar for users to enter the country’s name and the year in order to receive the further details of the expenditure. The second example I found is football players skills at the NFL Scouting Combine in the different countries. I can see the increasing or decreasing trend of football players skills each year. While I learn from this example, I would like to create a map that shows the trend of travel expenditure by country and year. So that I can see the relationship between the year and the expenditure for each country.

Data & Software I used for this visualizations

United Nations Traveling Expenditure

I used the United Nations to find the traveling data file, and then I used Open Refine to clean to unnecessary data. After that I opened the excel file in the Tableau to generate three visualizations included the world map, the line graph, and the dots graph.

Design Methodology and procedures

There are three dimensions showcasing in this file are: year, country, and the travel expenditure. Also, it includes over 100 rows of this excel file. I thought the structure of this data is enough to explore. I started to think what are the three types of visualizations I want to create. As I mentioned in introduction of the topic, I learnt from two examples that shows the different style of the visualize to show the relationship between locations and values. With over 100 countries’ data, I assumed the best way to address the relationship between expenditure and the country is a world map.

Travel Expenditure each countries

So firstly I create an animated map showing the differences in travel expenditures each country by the value of color. As a result, I can see the highest travel expenditures country is the United States which is shown in the darkest blue. There are showcases the expenditures of the rest of the world by light yellow. I can hover each country to see what the actual expenditures in details. I thought the result of an animated map would be shown the various value of colors which it could be more vivid and interesting, but I couldn’t define the data only looking at the numbers on the excel file to predict the way I would become.

The line graph of travel expenditure

The second graph I want to create is the line graph which can show the trend of the expenditure of the country. I found in the data file that each country has more than three years’ records of travel expenditures. So that I considered to generate the line graph to see the trend of the expenditures. Does it go upward or downward of a country when the time goes by? The final result of this line graph I can tell the trend by seeing the line’s directions. Later I want to know how to change the colors to show differences between upward trends and downward trends. I found the difficulties to change the colors because of the limitations of the data. This is the question I want to understand how to select the right data set without too many limitations during the designing process.

The dot graph of travel expenditure between China and United States

The graph I original want to create is to show the comparisons between the two countries. I picked the highest travel expenditure country (United States), then I chose another country (China) as a comparison. Ideally, I want to create a dot graph for two of the countries if I can make a standard value on the below to see the positions of these dots which enable users to see the differences between USA and China, but I couldn’t make it showcase this graph. So I changed the way to show the dot graphs individually and insert the annotations of the highest expenditures from 1995 to 2015.

Observations and findings

This is an interesting topic to explore by using Tableau for data visualizations, the more I explored this topic I realized sometime it may be more accurate to understand the percentage of the GDP instead of only showing the visitors’ expenditure by dollars. It may be a huge expenses of 300 USD in some developing country. Therefore, how to find certain data is another challenge to solve.

Future Potential Works & Reflections

For the next step, I want to consider my target audience at the beginning, because until I design the second graphs I just realized maybe my target audience is someone who likes to travel and have a sense of traveling budget. If I can think of my target audience first, and I can predict what kinds of design may suitable for them. Also, I want to be able to insert the customized enter bar/country’s filter such as my example of works in order to provide users friendly digital experiences or create a nice appearance of a map such an as above image to look nicer on the website ( It can be done by different type of datas)

Research

My favorite Tableau visualizations
https://blog.mapbox.com/my-favorite-tableau-visualizations-d85e869200b4?fbclid=IwAR2Fpxdi250dkjyE6ylCJtJS5RaOo1–ZstFehl-uaT20MD0pOFnRvoQrMM

Tableau Public
https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/gallery/nfl-scouting-combine-history?gallery=votd