Borderlines.wtf — an interactive map to explore visa restrictions for a group
Whether travelling with an international group of friends or planning an offsite for a company — navigating visa restrictions for a group is cumbersome. Borderlines tells you exactly where you can all go together — but it's also just fun to play around with.
How it works
Select the countries that your group has passports from by clicking on them. They are marked with green dots. Click again to deselect. All other countries will instantly change their color to reflect where you can all go together.
The summary in the bottom left shows you the stats of the currently selected group. In the example below, a group of people from America, Poland, Algeria and Indonesia can travel to 9 countries visa-free. 62 countries can be travelled to with low effort (eVisas, on-arrival visas for 30$) while 125 countries are hard or impossible to access.
To get the exact list, you can leave your email and you'll receive a free report within a few second. This report lists all countries and their status.
You can also zoom in and out of the map and in the top right is a button to reset your location (after all some of the smaller countries are easily overlooked).
To consider group members with multiple passports, just select one of their passports, take a look and then deselect it to then select the other passport and compare.
Challenges
While building this, I played around with it a lot.
- Which countries give the most access?
- Which countries gives surprising access? (I was surprised how much access South Americans have to Europe via Spain/Portugal)
- Which combination of two countries have the least access?
- What combination of non-European countries still gives you visa-free access to 100+ countries?
- Which countries take in anyone? (If all else fails, go check out Astana with your team/friends)
Design decisions
This is a simple website — but there are some difficult design problems.
First of all I have to show two pieces of information per country:
- Selection status (on or off)
- Entry requirements (none, low effort, high)
I chose to go with the green dots for selected countries, overlaying on the base color which ranges from dark grey to light grey.
I contemplated coloring the border, but this did not work for smaller countries. I considered merging the two data points into one set of colors, i.e. one color for selected and low effort to enter and another color for not selected and low effort to enter. Also tried this with shades, like light green vs. dark green for selected/deselected visa-free.
In the end this seems to be the best way to show it — but still not instantly clear to the user.
If you find a better way, please message me on twitter @csteadone.
