Visualization Design Practices in a Crisis: Behind the Scenes with COVID-19 Dashboard Creators

TL;DR

This study explores how COVID-19 dashboard creators navigated design challenges, tensions, and public engagement during the pandemic, revealing complex practices and conflicts in visualization development.

Contribution

It provides a detailed qualitative analysis of the design practices, tensions, and decision-making processes behind COVID-19 dashboards during the crisis.

Findings

Design practices evolve from creation to termination influenced by multiple factors.

Tensions arise between public demands and policies regarding information visualization.

Strategies are employed to address misinterpretations and misuse of visualizations.

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of data visualizations were created to inform the public about the rapidly evolving crisis. Data dashboards, a form of information dissemination used during the pandemic, have facilitated this process by visualizing statistics regarding the number of COVID-19 cases over time. In this research, we conducted a qualitative interview study among dashboard creators from federal agencies, state health departments, mainstream news media outlets, and other organizations that created (often widely-used) COVID-19 dashboards to answer the following questions: how did visualization creators engage in COVID-19 dashboard design, and what tensions, conflicts, and challenges arose during this process? Our findings detail the trajectory of design practices -- from creation to expansion, maintenance, and termination -- that are shaped by the complex interplay between design goals, tools and technologies, labor, emerging crisis contexts, and public engagement. We particularly examined the tensions between designers and the general public involved in these processes. These conflicts, which often materialized due to a divergence between public demands and standing policies, centered around the type and amount of information to be visualized, how public perceptions shape and are shaped by visualization design, and the strategies utilized to deal with (potential) misinterpretations and misuse of visualizations. Our findings and lessons learned shed light on new ways of thinking in visualization design, focusing on the bundled activities that are invariably involved in human and nonhuman participation throughout the entire trajectory of design practice.