The map below is an example of using the leafletR package to demonstrate statistics about a location (in this example, by state). There are a few great tutorials on leaflet and creating something useful and beautiful is fairly simple. I’ve adapted the code from https://rstudio.github.io/leaflet/choropleths.html for the mapping. The R code to create it is below the figure.
For this map, the violent crime rate per 100,000 individuals by state in 2015 is highlighted. Several aspects are nice: we combined our data with the mapping features of MapBox, we can see the statistics by having the mouse over the map, and it looks aesthetically nice.