COVID-19 Dashboard Functionality and Design: Assessing Dashboard Design Service Providers for Health Disaster Response

Abstract

When disaster strikes, data visualizations are used as quick ways to concisely distill timely information to civilians. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, data-driven dashboards played a disproportionately large role in quickly collecting, processing, and conveying preliminary data to citizens. After the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard went viral, individual public health departments across the world realized the importance of distilling and delivering real-time data to citizens and decision makers. The widescale proliferation of dashboards across emergency response groups has only recently been made possible thanks to a business model in the software industry known as Platform as a Service, or PaaS, providers, which provide the data hosting, application development, and graphical interfaces for non-technical experts to deploy dashboards without an extensive background in web development. What the PaaS providers offer in ease-of-use, however, is traded against their limitations in functionality and accessibility. In this thesis, I used content analysis to perform a systematic review of 24 international COVID-19 data dashboards to understand international variation in COVID-19 dashboard design and to offer feature recommendations for software companies to incorporate into their PaaS platforms.