Adding Size to Scatter Visuals

This dataset, World Life Expectancy, has several other dimensions and measurements that you can use to enrich the scatter visual. Consider how using the Size shelf, which controls the size of the individual bubbles, changes our immediate understanding of the dataset and further informs its analysis.

For this visual, we will start with the existing visual World Population - Scatter, which is developed in Basic Scatter Visual.

  1. Above the left navigation bar, click Clone to create a new visual that has the same properties as the original.

  2. Under Measures, select population and drag it over the Size shelf on the main part of the screen. Drop to add it to the shelf.
  3. On the sum(population) field, click the (down arrow) icon, select Aggregates, and then select Average.
  4. Click Refresh Visual.

The scatter graph appears, with its own visible population size 'outliers': China, India, and the United States.

While we can see the average data for individual countries more clearly, these measurements do not help us see the changes that occurred over the entire time domain of the dataset.

Let's next look at how we can add the concept of time back into the visual by animating the scatter plot, as described in Adding Transition Animation to Scatter Visuals.