Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

Reflections on the Use of Dashboards in the Covid-19 Pandemic

Alessio Arleo, Rita Borgo, Jörn Kohlhammer, Roy Ruddle, Holger Scharlach, Xiaoru Yuan

TL;DR

The paper investigates COVID-19 dashboards from a field-user perspective to understand how they supported public health communication, policy making, and clinical decision making under urgent conditions. It uses semi-structured interviews with five domain experts who relied on dashboards in daily work and synthesizes findings with prior dashboard literature to extract practical lessons. The authors offer a set of design recommendations—emphasizing data provenance, multi-source integration, data granularity, ethical data sharing, learning curves, customization, expert feedback, and human–machine guidance—to improve crisis visualization. The study highlights the diversity of dashboards used during the pandemic, the importance of trustworthy, interpretable visualizations, and the need for ongoing collaboration between visualization researchers and public health practitioners to combat misinformation and enhance decision support.

Abstract

Dashboards have arguably been the most used visualizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. They were used to communicate its evolution to national governments for disaster mitigation, to the public domain to inform about its status, and to epidemiologists to comprehend and predict the evolution of the disease. Each design had to be tailored for different tasks and to varying audiences - in many cases set up in a very short time due to the urgent need. In this paper, we collect notable examples of dashboards and reflect on their use and design during the pandemic from a user-oriented perspective: we interview a group of researchers with varying visualization expertise who actively used dashboards during the pandemic as part of their daily workflow. We discuss our findings and compile a list of lessons learned to support future visualization researchers and dashboard designers.

Reflections on the Use of Dashboards in the Covid-19 Pandemic

TL;DR

The paper investigates COVID-19 dashboards from a field-user perspective to understand how they supported public health communication, policy making, and clinical decision making under urgent conditions. It uses semi-structured interviews with five domain experts who relied on dashboards in daily work and synthesizes findings with prior dashboard literature to extract practical lessons. The authors offer a set of design recommendations—emphasizing data provenance, multi-source integration, data granularity, ethical data sharing, learning curves, customization, expert feedback, and human–machine guidance—to improve crisis visualization. The study highlights the diversity of dashboards used during the pandemic, the importance of trustworthy, interpretable visualizations, and the need for ongoing collaboration between visualization researchers and public health practitioners to combat misinformation and enhance decision support.

Abstract

Dashboards have arguably been the most used visualizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. They were used to communicate its evolution to national governments for disaster mitigation, to the public domain to inform about its status, and to epidemiologists to comprehend and predict the evolution of the disease. Each design had to be tailored for different tasks and to varying audiences - in many cases set up in a very short time due to the urgent need. In this paper, we collect notable examples of dashboards and reflect on their use and design during the pandemic from a user-oriented perspective: we interview a group of researchers with varying visualization expertise who actively used dashboards during the pandemic as part of their daily workflow. We discuss our findings and compile a list of lessons learned to support future visualization researchers and dashboard designers.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 8 sections, 3 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Dashboards in Visualization
  2. Dashboard Design during COVID-19: our Developer Perspective
  3. Dashboards in the Field
  4. Interviewing Experts Participants and Protocol
  5. Interviewing Experts Results and discussion
  6. Takeaways
  7. Conclusions
  8. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Framing our paper contribution (orange) within the visualization design process.
  • Figure 2: Four notable examples of the most popular dashboards seen during the Covid-19 pandemic. The difference between the designs of these dashboards is an effective indication of their intended scope and audience.
  • Figure 3: Not all public dashboards used maps as the main visualization, like this example from Chongqing Municipal Health Commission.