Visualizing Vaccines
Graphicacy and the International Vaccine Access Center Bring Vital Data to Life
OVERVIEW
In 2016, the International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health introduced its revolutionary online platform, VIEW-hub, as a one-stop resource for global vaccine data.
This interactive, map-based platform allowed researchers, policymakers, public health officials, and program funders to call up data related to vaccine introduction and use, access, and coverage around the world.
The IVAC team saw tremendous potential for VIEW-hub to evolve into a more robust tool for users and administrators alike, but they recognized its limitations as time passed. IVAC selected data visualization experts Graphicacy to make the platform more engaging, more intuitive, and easier to update — benefits that will prove especially valuable when new COVID-19 vaccines become available.
The Challenge: A Need for Speed and Simplicity
Vaccine data changes constantly. Nearly every month, somewhere in the world, a country introduces a new vaccine or changes which products it uses in its immunization programs. VIEW-hub, in its first incarnation, relied on developers to input all new data. Communication back and forth on updates could take days and adding new layers to VIEW-hub maps necessitated more delays. IVAC staff also spent long stretches scouring dense vaccine literature for new data and other relevant information to post to VIEW-hub users.
Meanwhile, platform users encountered delays of their own. VIEW-hub’s map was published on a single URL, which contributed to slow load times. Mobile users and those in low-bandwidth areas struggled to gain access.
The Solution: Streamline All Systems
Short-term fixes would only take VIEW-hub so far. Graphicacy suggested targeting the root problems with a rebuild to enhance access, navigation, and management. Graphicacy’s designers and engineers immersed themselves in the world of vaccine data and IVAC’s operations to better understand their language, day-to-day processes, impediments, and end-user needs.
“We’ve honed our data literacy over the years on large visualization projects for groups like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, and the MESA Alliance,” said Jeff Osborn, Graphicacy’s creative director. “We combined this experience and user interviews to shape our strategy for improving presentation and functionality.”
“Graphicacy’s attention to detail was remarkable,” said Kirthini Muralidharan, IVAC’s VIEW-hub project coordinator. “They were quickly attuned with our way of working and our goals for the project. They brought to the table a new level of creativity and valuable wisdom from similar projects.”
Graphicacy chose Airtable as a content management solution to accelerate data updates. IVAC staff now simply key data into Airtable, which automatically populates on VIEW-hub’s front end. IVAC can also add new map layers with minimal developer input.
To eliminate IVAC’s tedious content search process, Graphicacy integrated an auto-scrape of the PubMed interface. PubMed uses established parameters to collect and post relevant vaccine information from biomedical literature.
Maximizing user efficiency and satisfaction required a cleaner, lighter interface. Graphicacy gave each map its own unique URL, eliminated unnecessary features, made important features prominent, and incorporated a unified, colorblind-safe palette for easier navigation. “We wanted to make sure both the data and design were understandable to anyone who doesn’t live in the vaccine world 24/7,” said Graphicacy’s Carni Klirs who led design on the project. “Intuitive visualization always considers the perspective of the end user.”
The Result: A View Like No Other
IVAC has realized its goal of creating a real-time, searchable, map-based visualization of global vaccine data. The fully interactive VIEW-hub platform now serves up current and historical data on several vaccines in plain terms across 113 different map layers — with the potential to easily add more, including vaccine data specific to adults.
Within the overhauled VIEW-hub, disease burden datasets gained more prominence to help stakeholders make informed decisions and track progress.
Upgrades in speed abound across the platform. Data updates that once took days to publish now appear almost instantaneously, and users on all devices enjoy a much faster loading process. In fact, the most data-heavy map layers now load in just one to two seconds.
Once they arrive at the platform, the section-based organization allows users to see certain groups of high-level data or dive deep for more granular statistics. Graphicacy also stacked the country-specific data for easy scrolling, where previously this data was hard to access spread across multiple tabs buried within a modal window.
Moreover, Graphicacy’s URL system for map layers allows IVAC to easily track analytics and learn more about VIEW-hub’s users, what they look for, and how they interact with the platform — vital knowledge to guide ongoing refinements.
Just weeks after its rollout, VIEW-hub received high praise for its sleek and inviting new design. “Sponsors and funders are raving about the sophisticated new look,” said Maria Deloria Knoll, IVAC’s director of epidemiology. “When a tool looks impressive, like this one does, people are more inclined to believe the data, use it more, and share it often. That’s our whole goal for VIEW-hub.”
Moving forward, as COVID-19 vaccines become licensed and available globally, VIEW-hub’s ability to easily add new vaccines and countries will make it an indispensable resource in the overall response. IVAC hopes to secure additional support to add mapping features that allow users to quickly see where people have access to the vaccines and which ones are in use at the state and provincial level.
“Thanks to the recent upgrade, VIEW-hub is standing by and ready to go for COVID-19 vaccines,” said Deloria Knoll. “With just a few keystrokes, we’ll empower people to see how the COVID-19 pandemic is finally being defeated.”
Graphicacy partners with clients to tell engaging stories with data. Graphicacy’s team combines storytelling, thoughtful human-centered design and deep technical capabilities to build and deploy strategic, data-rich digital projects. Graphicacy’s team has created data visualizations and infographics for top-tier organizations and companies, domestically and internationally, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the World Bank, the Center for American Progress, the Anti-Defamation League and many others.
