Fifty-seven researchers, one page the public could use
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The UNC Gillings COVID-19 Dashboard gathered what North Carolina's public health researchers were finding and put it somewhere the public could reach it. Fifty-seven contributors across nine groups: epidemiologists, demographers, data managers, community engagement staff, postdocs and students.
My job was not to decorate any of it. We were on calls together every week, and what I had to do was turn what those researchers were finding into something a person worried about their family could read at midnight and act on in the morning. Working inside a group that size is the part of my university work people ask about most.
The dashboard is no longer online, because the project's funding ended. These screens come from a preserved copy of the build as it ran.
So grateful for Adrial’s creativity, excellent design, and outstanding customer service. He is masterful and an essential part of our team.
Barbara K. Rimer, DrPHDean Emerita, UNC Gillings School of Global Public HealthThe front page
The state's numbers, then a way in
Cases and deaths for North Carolina, set large enough to read across a room, with a county view behind them. Under that, three doors into the research: maps and visualizations, papers, calculators. Somebody arriving frightened gets the number first and a route second, which is the right order.
The library
Twelve pieces of research, sorted by what they are
Testing protocols, statistical considerations, prevalence studies, and three calculators for the testing itself: pooling samples, correcting for test accuracy, improving yield. Each row says what kind of thing it is and opens a page of its own, with tabs for whitepapers, maps and research apps. A county health director and a journalist need different rows off the same table.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
The questions
Thirty-two answers, written the way people ask
Can I get COVID twice. Where can I get a test. What are the different types of test. Thirty-two questions across clinical, testing populations, slowing the spread and business concerns, each with an answer from the people doing the research. This is what the SEO work actually was: not keywords added afterwards, but answers built in the shape of the question somebody types.
Honest limits
Where to go when the answer is somewhere else
Public health authorities, testing guidelines, vaccines and treatments, projections and forecasting, business resources, policy evaluations. Links out, chosen and grouped and kept current. A dashboard that behaves as though it has every answer loses the person who needed the one it does not have.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
Who it took
Fifty-seven people, in nine groups
A core team, then health services research, demography, data management, academic practice translation, postdocs and students, community engagement, the mobile app, project management. Every contributor named with their field and their institution. The list is the credibility: a reader deciding whether to trust a number can see exactly who produced it.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
The network
Where the work came from
The dashboard drew on research from across the UNC system, and the about page says so with twelve institutions' marks together in one block. For a public health resource in an emergency, where the data came from is not a footnote at the bottom. It is most of the reason to believe any of it.
The mark
The flattened curve, turned into the logo
By the middle of 2020 one shape had already done the explaining, and it was the curve everybody was being asked to flatten. So the mark is that curve: a wave that settles where the real one spikes, set beside the school's own lockup and sized to sit under it. The three-curve drawing makes the same argument with no words at all. The section icons are a licensed set, not mine, put on the palette so a library, a calculator and a list of questions still read as one thing.
What it was for
Researchers, officials, and everyone else
The about page closes on who this was built to reach: scientists sharing what they had found, officials setting policy, and anybody in the state trying to work out what to do next. Three audiences, one page, and the whole job was making sure none of them had to read the other two's version first.
How the translation worked
Answers shaped like questions
The questions page is written in the words somebody actually types, not the words a research team would use for the same thing. That is most of what the search work was, and it is why a page about testing populations could be found by a person asking whether they could catch it twice.
One record, three ways to reach it
A study is entered once and appears in the full table, under its own type, and wherever else it belongs. The team added research as it came out, in the middle of a pandemic, without a developer in the loop.
Search on every page
A search field sits in the header throughout, because somebody who arrived from a link about masks and now wants to know about testing should not have to go back to the homepage to start again.
A glossary under the questions
Positivity rate, cumulative case, prevalence, symptomatic case. The terms the briefings used, defined at the foot of the questions page, so the answer above could use the real word without losing the reader.
The roster filters itself
Nine groups of contributors, filterable, so somebody looking for the demographers does not scroll past the postdocs. On a list that long the filter is the difference between a credit and a wall.
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Craig WoodCEO, Definian
Your great work deserves to look great.
Twenty-five minutes. Tell me what you're trying to do and who needs to see it, and I'll tell you what I'd build first and roughly what it costs.