Is curiosity part of your company DNA?
A UX design competition in curiosity using COVID-19 data
At SAS, curiosity is one of the foundations of who we are and is an integral part of our culture. But I am not here to plug our corporate brand as it really speaks for itself in what we do every day across the company. Rather, I want to talk about how our UX Designers are curious by nature, and how we recently tapped into that innate curiosity in an internal competition.
As UX designers, we tend to have a heightened sense of empathy and strive to walk in the shoes of our users. But we are also people and COVID-19 affects us just like it does most everyone. From lockdowns to mask-wearing and from the grief of the loss of a loved one to the anxiety of becoming ill ourselves, we all seek answers and many of us want to see those answers visually and with the facts and data that come with those answers.
By the same spirit, one of our User Experience managers embarked on an interesting idea with its foundation firmly anchored in curiosity. An internal competition to allow us to walk in our users’ shoes was launched using our flagship product, SAS Visual Analytics. But this story isn’t so much about great software that is able to do great things but rather the story is about what you can do with data and how you can visualize it for good. Don’t get me wrong, profit and money-making are important endeavors and we pursue them with vigor like any other company. But so is understanding the world around us and be able to make value-based decisions in our lives. And considering that since the project was kicked off, COVID-19 cases had tripled from 5 million to 16 million worldwide it was a topic worth investigating. Furthermore, since publishing this article, worldwide COVID-19 cases have reached 24 million.
The competition consisted of seven teams (five in the US and two in India) and was tasked with exploring data sets from John Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center using charts, tables, page layouts, and other visual design elements. Teams could also add other external data sets to further enhance their project. Judges for the competition were asked to rate the efforts for UX design, visual design, responsive design, and new ways to use the product or present interactive insights. Naturally, all teams scored well on Clarity of Information, Visual Feel, and Layout and Spacing. More challenging were the data science skills such as Storytelling with Data, Working with Data, Data Manipulation, and Data Visualization which gave us a great take-away. We need to invest more in those skills to better understand our users even more than we already do.
Although all seven teams produced excellent designs using the COVID-19 data, for purposes of this article, I will highlight the winner of the competition which excelled at beautiful graphic illustrations that highlighted the insights discovered in the data.
However, one judge’s comment summed up the competition very well: “Each team has done a tremendous job and going through this exercise and coming with their own way to tell the visual story. It is always hard to then give critical feedback about each approach and then compare them because of the skill-set differences. Having said that each team has some unique angle to their story and their effort is very much appreciated.”
All of the competing teams presented an overview page/tab that identified the key areas of the report and offered high-level insights to the user. We’ve found that dumping a user into a detailed view can be jarring. Giving your users a way to ease in rather than overwhelming them is an important aspect of good report design.
Another aspect of good report design is to utilize familiar graphical elements that help the user to focus on the use of small multiples. This technique, for the curious reader, was first identified in the seminal work by Edward Tufte and is highly recommended reading for anyone designing reports. Note the question: “Are Countries Flattening the Curve?” in the title of the report which focuses the user on the content which is organized by the country flags. The red, yellow, and green headers show the trajectory of the curves and immediately give the user a hint as to whether the countries located beneath them are bad, neutral, or good.
Also important is the ability to drill in and get more detailed data. Using tabs with easy to understand titles help to organize the report. The natural flow for European languages is to go from left to right to emphasize the general to specific. In this report, the team is showing more detailed data for a particular country, in this case, the state of North Carolina and the home location of SAS in the United States.
Finally, the team used some fun graphics to show some more important information to the user. Of course, COVID-19 is not a laughing matter but the principal of using animations to emphasize a conclusion found in the data is nevertheless a valuable one no matter the subject being explored. Note the use of the coronavirus shape in the gauges and the symptom animations below.
In conclusion, we at SAS find it extremely important to excite the curiosity of our employees and allow for some time to focus on things that not only benefit society as a whole such as our Data for Good projects but also projects like this that get those creative juices flowing and at the same time help us walk in the shoes of our users, improve our products by using them like our users do and learn something about the world around us.
Credits:
Teams: Roaring 20 Somethings — Sierra Shell, Megan Fowler, Blair Torres; White Walkers — Rashmi Aghor, Pallavi Deshmukh; Osprey — Khaliah Cothran, Karl Prewo, Elizabeth Lyne; Data Squad — Aditi Barve, Rahul Godbole, Rohan Dinde; The Homebodies — Susan Lyons, Huifang Wang, Cheryl Coyle; Eagles — Jeanne Marie Tan, Chris Rackley, Ginny Matsey; Herons — Adrianna Vu, Rebecca Hemstad, Paul Hankey
Judges: Atrin Assa, Anand Chitale, Jeff Diamond, Jason Shoffner, Brandi Gull, Christine Browning
Application, Server, and Data Set-Up: Jason Shoffner
Organizers: Rajiv Ramarajan, Riley Benson, Mark Malek
