Bringing Vital Public Health Law and Policy Data to the Masses

Graphicacy helped Temple University’s Center for Public Health Law Research revamp their scientific legal mapping tool for global usage.

Since 2016, lawyers and academics have relied on the LawAtlas as a primary source of public health law and policy information. Maintained by the Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, the one-of-a-kind scientific legal mapping tool includes vast legal datasets organized by topic (e.g., abortion and e-cigarettes) and jurisdiction (local, national, and international).

Center leadership saw tremendous potential for their robust data to benefit users and use cases beyond the legal sphere. However, expanding LawAtlas’s reach would require a complete user experience. With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Center enlisted Graphicacy to make their flagship tool more accessible and more intuitive to a broader range of audiences.

Streamlined and Simple

Graphicacy’s mandate was clear, but the challenge was steep: Organize volumes of complex legal data in an interface that was both useful to the legal community and intuitive for government and public health practitioners, advocates, journalists, and the general public.

“We asked Graphicacy to convey much more information through legal mapping and to do so in ways that provide value to different users,”said Scott Burris, Director of the Center for Public Health Law Research.

Graphicacy, with design and engineering partner Eli Holder of 3 is a pattern, collaborated with the Center team to rethink the entire visual ecosystem — starting with a cleaner, interactive design to replace static tables and volumes of small type.

All told, the Center has more than 200 datasets users can explore, though only a handful of these were available at the time of design. Graphicacy worked with those most representative of the entire data spectrum to develop solutions encompassing all possible scenarios and data visualization and geospatial displays, including a US tile map, local map, and global map.

Within this new scheme, users have options to view data in tables or map formats, with simple black-and-white tiles representing states and local jurisdictions. They can read current laws and track their evolution into the past. Users can also filter using color-coded variables and create comparisons across maps based on a question-and-answer format.

“It’s a stark, simple landscape punctuated by beautiful blooms of color that draw your attention and guide you along,” said Jeffrey Osborn, Graphicacy’s Creative Director.

“The new filters show the presence and absence of variables in different ways, which lets us tell richer and more nuanced stories around what’s happening in the law,” said Bethany Saxon, Director of Communications at the Center for Public Health Law Research. “Graphicacy also managed to work in colors from the Temple and Beasley brands, so that was a nice touch.”

Data overlap functionality enables users to see all data for a policy, such as abortion, in one visualization. “In our previous iteration, they had to go through each dataset individually,” said Bethany.

Zooming Out

For global views, a conventional tile map would not be feasible due to a lack of horizontal scrolling space. Graphicacy considered different geospatial methods and the merits of geographical vs geopolitical displays and ultimately landed on a clean, grid-like global tile arrangement that matched the World Health Organization’s country groupings​​.

“We used tiles to represent countries and arranged them on the page in a way that resembled where one would find them on a world map, reading left to right,” said Eduardo Velez, former Lead Data Visualization Engineer at Graphicacy.

User Friendly and Functional

To enhance the tool’s searchability, Graphicacy indexed policy data by keyword, topic, and geography. The addition of new popup windows provide lay users with richer information as well as tips for making the most of LawAtlas and its data. Iterative testing with lawyers and other key audiences shaped the evolution of these features and other refinements.

“The new visualizations convey the strength and power appropriate to law, but they also help neutralize the complexity and potential intimidation for other users,” said Jeffrey.

“It’s amazing how this changes the game for all users,” said Bethany. “It lets us talk about data in a way that’s so much more appealing and encourages users to explore and click around. This will be incredibly useful for anyone looking to better understand the public health policy landscape and effect change going forward.”

Graphicacy helps organizations like yours tell informative, provocative, inspiring stories using facts, figures, and trends to show audiences why your mission matters — and what their role is in the fight.

That’s the power of visual storytelling. It draws people in and connects them to the issue and your work on an emotional level. It creates an experience they can’t look away from. And it invites them to do something about it.

Graphicacy has created data visualizations and infographics for top-tier organizations and companies, domestically and internationally, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, the World Resources Institute Everytown for Gun Safety, the World Bank, The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and many others.