Navigation Redesign of the COVID-19 Dashboard | Wireframes and Design

Navigation Redesign of the National COVID-19 Dashboard | Deloitte Analytics and Deloitte Digital

Wireframes and Design

🏆 Winner of 2022 Ministry of Justice’s Governmental Transparency Award 🏆

Overview

The Corona pandemic (COVID-19) Burst into our life at the beginning of 2020. In March of this year, it hit Israeli society and forced it to adapt quickly to a new rapid reality, when new regulations and health policies changed several times a month. To gain the public’s cooperation and establish trust and transparency with the people, the Israeli Ministry of Health decided to externalize Corona’s data.

MOH reached us (Deloitte), and we built a dashboard that communicates the always-changing and
never-ending data and insights. The data transform into clear and communicative charts that track the virus's effect on Israel in different aspects.

I was assigned to this project a few months after it began, so this case study will deal with the improvements I worked on.

Role:
UX/UI Designer

Team:
Strategy Manager, Project Managers, BI analysts,
and FE Developers

Project Duration:
Ongoing, 2020-2021

Clients:
Ministry of Health and its BI IT Department

Our Users

The general public - for example, a teenager interested in confirmed COVID-19 cases, seriously ill patients’ numbers, or parents trying to decide if their child can go to school the next day. In the war against COVID-19, the citizens are not passive information consumers but significant and influential players in preventing and dealing with the pandemic. Many users used the dashboard like a weather forecast which helped them make daily decisions, and during the peak times of the lockdowns and different waves of infections, the dashboard’s traffic got higher.
Journalists, social influencers, data enthusiasts, and public health researchers - to supply data for communicative purposes, such as news and articles on newspapers, blogs, and social media.
MOH highly prioritized accurate media coverage in times of uncertainty and understood the power of accessible data for media representatives. The corona pandemic reemphasized the critical importance of professional, high-quality, independent communication, whose role is to provide the public with reliable information during health, economic and political crisis accompanied by uncertainty and massive amounts of fake news.
Academic researchers - to supply data and analytics for local and worldwide research purposes. Israel’s unique health system structure attracts academic researchers, also due to the population’s heterogeneity and leading the COVID-19 vaccines process.
Stakeholders and decision-makers - to supply data for health policymakers. They establish guidelines regarding the coronavirus for the public, business owners, professionals, local authorities, medical teams, and health system members. Vaccines, isolation, green pass, and COVID certificate, for example, are all topics in our daily life that rely on data-driven policies.

Redesigning the
Main Navigation

The COVID-19 platform was divided into two separate platforms: the public dashboard and an internal platform that was designated for MOH’s stakeholders. The redesign will deal with the navigation versions on both platforms, but mainly on the public platform since its changes were later implemented on the internal platform.

The problems

Visibility - the general public (the primary users) doesn’t have easy access to all of the COVID information MOH publishes.
Accessibility - advanced users, such as researchers and journalists, don’t have access to COVID’s raw data for deeper uses (like epidemic analysis).

The Goals

Increase discoverability - users should quickly understand the site's new content and how to locate it.
Create a data ecosystem - provide access to advanced data analysis and map-based dashboards.
Meet future product goals - a broader goal is transforming the dashboard into one significant domain populating different health areas and dashboards.

The data resources ecosystem:

The Process

First Version

At first, two COVID dashboards existed: The public dashboard and the internal platform designated for MOH stakeholders. It populated multiple dashboards beside the COVID-19 data tracker and sometimes personal classified information. The users could reach it within the MOH BI interface (Tableau infrastructure).

The internal platform contains seven different COVID dashboards and also a user guide:

The public dashboard contains the COVID tracker, an about page, terms of use page, and a user guide. Here we emphasized the COVID tracker, which externalizes selected metrics regarding the COVID spread in Israel. “CEO status” is an internal dashboard supplying strategic information for MOH stakeholders. Since the dashboard’s users in the first stage were the public (before the project got the researchers’ attention), there wasn’t a need for accessive details of epidemiology, procurement, etc.

Second Version

Version goal - at the end of December 2020, we designed a new navigation version containing three additional content areas as part of MOH's growing product strategy. MOH wanted to externalize the COVID information since they understood the importance of adding other content worlds to the dashboard and making more data accessible to all users. In the future, they aimed to lower the COVID-19 dashboard a level in the hierarchy and create one domain that contains many dashboards. Also, MOH wanted to connect the internal BI portal to the public dashboard, and this was the beginning of the process.

The new part we added to the navigation is the “data world”, which is divided into the following areas:

GIS - map-based dashboards where the users can follow the progress of the COVID spread in terms of vaccination, morbidity, and isolations in local authorities.
HayaData - analytic reports that share insights about hospitalization days, patients in critical condition, detection of morbidity through tests, the spread of morbidity in the education system, and more of the impact of the corona epidemic in Israel.
Data Gov - the national governmental website that gathers open-source databases from all government ministries and enables easy and efficient data use. The goal of Data Gov is to present reliable and certified governmental information for public use as part of an open government policy that promotes transparency of government ministries. In addition to COVID-19 databases, the site has additional databases about health, housing, transportation, weather, and more.

Here we tested side navigation versus top navigation, and the new parts of the site were added to the existing parts: general status (COVID tracker), about, terms of use, and user guide. We have maintained a simple and uncomplicated navigation mechanism.

Third version

Version goal - designing a new version of the top navigation to create a cleaner option to represent the information and content on the site and to make a clear separation between everything related to the COVID dashboard itself (the center of the site) and the “data world”.

The “data world” contains external links to assets of the Ministry of Health, which are directly or indirectly related to COVID, but they are not part of the dashboard. Additionally, I added a “new” tag to highlight the newly added section.

Another advantage of this chosen option is that we can add or remove additional future content from the navigation without taking up a lot of real estate from the menu. This flexible option is the best considering the rapidity of the project, the frequent changes, and sometimes the lack of a clear product strategy.
In addition, this option was relatively simple to develop from a development point of view.

To keep the navigation clear and clean, the dashboard title and the “last update time” have been moved to a separate line below the main navigation line.

In early 2021, I continued to develop this option. I examined several options for icons and different names for areas in the sub-menu. Because it is a combination of English and Hebrew, it was essential to find the clearest copy.

At the beginning of March 2021, I designed a final dashboard version along with the last navigation.
A sub-menu containing the relevant external links has been added to the GIS and HayaData. This option allows adding or removing sections without "shaking" the navigation, especially when many HayaData reports are added.

Inspiration from Intercom’s main navigation (organizing the various areas of the site concisely and clearly without taking much space, and also aren’t hidden like in the hamburger menu):