Integrating human-centered design in public health data dashboards: lessons from the development of a data dashboard of sexually transmitted infections in New York State

Bahareh Ansari; Erika G Martin

doi:10.1093/jamia/ocad102

Integrating human-centered design in public health data dashboards: lessons from the development of a data dashboard of sexually transmitted infections in New York State

J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2024 Jan 18;31(2):298-305. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocad102.

Authors

Bahareh Ansari¹, Erika G Martin²

Affiliations

¹ Organization, Work, and Leadership Department, Queen's Management School, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, UK.
² Department of Public Administration and Policy, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany, Albany, New York, USA.

PMID: 37330670
PMCID: PMC10797265 (available on 2024-06-18)
DOI: 10.1093/jamia/ocad102

Abstract

Objective: The increased availability of public data and accessible visualization technologies enhanced the popularity of public health data dashboards and broadened their audience from professionals to the general public. However, many dashboards have not achieved their full potential due to design complexities that are not optimized to users' needs.

Material and methods: We used a 4-step human-centered design approach to develop a data dashboard of sexually transmitted infections for the New York State Department of Health: (1) stakeholder requirements gathering, (2) an expert review of existing data dashboards, (3) a user evaluation of existing data dashboards, and (4) an usability evaluation of the prototype dashboard with an embedded experiment about visualizing missing race and ethnicity data.

Results: Step 1 uncovered data limitations and software requirements that informed the platform choice and measures included. Step 2 yielded a checklist of general principles for dashboard design. Step 3 revealed user preferences that influenced the chart types and interactive features. Step 4 uncovered usability problems resulting in features such as prompts, data notes, and displaying imputed values for missing race and ethnicity data.

Discussion: Our final design was accepted by program stakeholders. Our modifications to traditional human-centered design methodologies to minimize stakeholders' time burden and collect data virtually enabled project success despite barriers to meeting participants in-person and limited public health agency staff capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conclusion: Our human-centered design approach and the final data dashboard architecture could serve as a template for designing public health data dashboards elsewhere.

Keywords: data visualization; human-centered design; public health informatics; sexually transmitted infections.

MeSH terms

Humans
New York
Pandemics*
Public Health
Sexually Transmitted Diseases*
Software