Five tools that turn a simulation into a decision
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Cancer Control PopSim is a research program at one of the twenty-five CDC prevention research centers in the country, working out how to get more people screened for colorectal cancer. Its findings are simulations and system maps: true, useful, and unreadable as a PDF.
The audience is a clinic director or a state health official with a budget decision to make this quarter. So the research had to become something they can put their own numbers into and get an answer from, and then send that exact answer to a board. Research that has to survive a budget meeting is common across these university projects.
The shelf
Five tools, numbered, each with a picture of itself
The hub is the only page that shows the whole set at once, every tool numbered with a thumbnail of what it actually looks like and a sentence on what it answers. A researcher arriving from a citation has to work out which of the five fits their question before opening any of them, and a list of names will not tell them.
Side by side
Two futures, and the difference in dollars
Set up what you do now in one column and what you're considering in the other: the intervention, how many people finish a colonoscopy, how many return the home test. The answer comes back as cost per person for each, the gap between them, and a sentence that says which is cheaper and by how much.
Everyone returns the test: $753 more per person
Step by step
Four steps, and nothing asked twice
The other calculator walks through its questions in order: the costs of each test, who pays, what outreach costs, which outcome you care about. Each step opens the next one and the sidebar tracks where you are. At the end every step is ticked, the answer is a table, and one button copies a link that reopens this exact result for somebody else.
The system
Five maps of why screening stalls
Research teams draw causal loops to show how clinic priorities, funding and staffing pull on each other. Here each one is a page you can zoom and drag, with a narrated introduction to the notation first, because a diagram this dense is useless to somebody who hasn't been taught to read one.
Reading one
Walked through a few steps at a time
A map with sixty arrows on it tells a newcomer nothing. So each diagram is walked through in steps: a question on the left, the part of the map it refers to lit up on the right, and the published studies behind each claim listed underneath with their DOIs.
The method travels
The same diagrams, pointed at menthol bans
Four more causal loops on a different subject entirely: why menthol bans matter, what drives retailer compliance, how the tobacco industry resists them, and what happens once one is enacted. Same notation, same walkthrough, no new interface. A method is only worth building once if the second subject costs almost nothing to add.
The fifth tool
A model with its assumptions attached
The impact model gets a page that introduces it, one launch button, and a set of questions answered before anybody asks them. Handing a health official a simulation without telling them what it assumes is how a tool ends up used wrong and then blamed for the answer.
Under the hood
The answer is already worked out
The calculator doesn't run a simulation while somebody waits. It reads 1,455 scenarios the team costed in advance, so the result appears as fast as the question is finished.
It leaves with you
Results export as a spreadsheet or a PDF, charts and settings included, for the meeting where somebody has to defend the number.
176 references, filterable
The studies behind the diagrams sit under each one, searchable by number or keyword, so a reviewer can check an arrow against its evidence.
Check out these other projects
UNC Gillings School of Global Public HealthFifty-seven researchers, one page the public could useNorth Carolina's public COVID-19 research dashboard: 57 contributors, 32 questions answered, and the state's numbers on the front page.See the project 
Consortium for Cancer Implementation ScienceFifty-three research tools, found in one searchFifty-three cancer research tools, searchable as you type and kept current by the consortium itself.See the project 
Cliff Cottage InnThe booking happens here, not on ExpediaA seven-suite inn in Eureka Springs, built to win the direct booking back from the travel platforms it is listed on.See the project Adrial is my go-to designer for anything my business needs … which is why I have used him for three different companies over the last 20+ years.
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.