Responses by Schema Design.

Background: The Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center aims to enhance the wellbeing of people around the world, particularly focusing on impoverished and marginalized populations in developing nations. We partnered with the Center to design and develop the 2023 Freedom and Prosperity Indexes, a website dedicated to exploring the relationship between freedom and prosperity in both developing and developed nations. The Freedom Index measures economic, political and legal freedoms for nearly every country in the world. The Prosperity Index measures economic wellbeing and human flourishing for the same countries and time period. The research findings are primarily for governments, international organizations, private-sector companies, philanthropic organizations and other stakeholders dedicated to advancing economic, political and legal freedoms in the pursuit of prosperity.

Larger picture: The Atlantic Council releases the Freedom and Prosperity Indexes annually, offering a unique perspective on global indicators for freedom and prosperity. These indexes not only track the evolution of these indicators over time but also show the intricate relationship between freedom and prosperity. The current edition covers 164 economies, providing a comprehensive analysis based on annual data spanning from 1995 to 2022.

The website serves as a companion to the published 2023 Freedom and Prosperity Index. It provides visitors the opportunity to directly engage with the data and explore its insights at their own discretion.

Design core: Users can view the data in several different ways. Notably, it includes a world map to show prosperity, freedom and combined indicators at a glance. Additionally, the site includes regional and country rankings, individual country profiles, and the ability to compare multiple regions or countries side by side. Overall, the site’s interface design facilitates intuitive navigation and user-friendly interaction with the data.

Favorite details: The Freedom and Prosperity Indexes in past years were previously represented as separate entities. We created a combined view of the indexes to highlight the relationship between the two. This feature lets users gain valuable insights by understanding how freedom and prosperity intersect and influence each other.

We also employed a diamond and circle shape to identify the Freedom and Prosperity indexes. These shapes visually represent a country’s status in each metric, and the format enables an easily comprehensible visual representation of the scores. The diamond and circle shapes also became the visual identifier for the website.

Challenges: Creating multiple views of the data that allow for deeper exploration but also layered within a single map view.

Navigation structure: Each section was created with a specific use-case and data view in mind. We designed the navigational elements of the site to move users intuitively to their area of interest.

Technology: We used React and D3 on the front end and user interface and Python for data processing.