In this ongoing unprecedented global situation of COVID-19, where everyone wishing and waiting for the end of this ‘game changer evil’, same time billions of us are curious for its daily update on numbers of globally affected cases. It has almost become part of our routine to refer couple of our favourite dashboards out of many which are being provided by various providers.
As a designer and one of the user of these dashboards, I felt that this is the product being used by billions of users around the globe and should be designed simplest enough to be understood by maximum users. Considering, this dashboard and data visualisation is a live design challenge, I decided to pursue this self realised design challenge and share the design and it’s crisp design rationale here .
Design Challenge
I see an interesting fact of this dashboard design— It is a kind of hybrid use-case of enterprise and consumer product (Kind of G2B2C), as this web product need to show complex data, graphs and analytics (typical enterprise product’s home page and data stream scenario) and being used by almost anyone around the globe (typical consumer product’s users scenario).
“It is a hybrid use-case of enterprise and consumer product.”
Focus of the Design — Simplicity and Intuitive Visual Relationships
Data it accommodates are complex but the information it reflects used by almost anyone, thus it is important to keep the design simplest and make it intuitively interactive for informative analytics with minimal learning.
Since attention was more on simplicity and lesser content, some challenges I added to make the screen less busy, are —
Can visuals communicate the information itself without colour legends?
Can info graphics be self explanatory without labels?
Design and Data Visualisation
On type of information priority, data are sequenced in,
Information tiles — Shows high priority categorial cases— Total, Recovered, Death, Active, New and Country with last updated time stamp.
Stacked Bar Graph Analytics combined with total case at location list.
Visualisation on World Map — Interlinked with stacked bar graph and ring pie interactions.
Interaction Design considerations
Show only most important informative data in top UI layers.
Reveal other informative data layers in UI, on interaction.
Maintain simplicity in analytics, visualisation and interaction.
Avoid repeated and mixed information.
Interaction — To reveal the information, intuitively laid in UI layers
Data Visualisation considerations
Self explanatory intuitive visual relationships.
High legibility on complex data representation.
Consistent simplicity in interaction design.
Accessible and findable information.
Map visualisation and interaction to drill down for country, state and city cases.
For example — Interactions include like Hover for a quick view to data layered in user interface and Click for the quick access to details of the same, replacing and updating top layer information and allows user to drill down by location, count category and other key parameters.
Overall, I enjoyed this quick design of COVID-19 data visualisation dashboard and loved to share it here.
*Number of cases digits were referred from various COVID-19 dashboard providers like CSSE JHU, Google data Studio etc.
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