COVID-19 Dashboard Functionality and Design: Assessing Dashboard Design Service Providers for Health Disaster Response
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Date
Authors
Roberts, Lucinda S.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
When disaster strikes, data visualizations are used as quick ways to concisely distill timely information to civilians. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, data-driven dashboards played a disproportionately large role in quickly collecting, processing, and conveying preliminary data to citizens. After the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard went viral, individual public health departments across the world realized the importance of distilling and delivering real-time data to citizens and decision makers. The widescale proliferation of dashboards across emergency response groups has only recently been made possible thanks to a business model in the software industry known as Platform as a Service, or PaaS, providers, which provide the data hosting, application development, and graphical interfaces for non-technical experts to deploy dashboards without an extensive background in web development. What the PaaS providers offer in ease-of-use, however, is traded against their limitations in functionality and accessibility. In this thesis, I used content analysis to perform a systematic review of 24 international COVID-19 data dashboards to understand international variation in COVID-19 dashboard design and to offer feature recommendations for software companies to incorporate into their PaaS platforms.
Description
71 pages
Keywords
User Stories, Content Analysis, Covid-19, Cartography, User Interface, Disaster Response