Welcome to the third and final part of my final project for Telling Stories with Data at Carnegie Mellon University. Throughout this project, I applied many of the skills I learned in class to a topic of great personal interest, telehealth in rural communities. My final product, ‘Strengthening Digital Infrastructure and Telehealth Capabilities for a Healthier Rural America’ blends concepts of design, storytelling, and data visualization to provide local public health officials and community advocate with resources to build capacity for telehealth in their communities. This final product is the result of an iterative process through which I drafted ideas, collected user feedback, and refined my work based on both feedback from users and my own ever-developing knowledge about design and data visualization. In part 1 of the final project, I developed an initial idea and began sketching visualizations, and identifying data sources. As I moved onto part 2, I incorporated feedback on my initial sketches and outline from part 1. During part 2, I further developed my ideas and wireframed my story with high fidelity prototypes of my visualizations. Additionally, I composed a script to conduct user research, and interviewed three potential users to obtain detailed feedback on the impact and pereception of my story. At the end of part 2, I turned the results of these interviews into actionable steps to improve my project. As I proceed with step 3, I will explore how I incorported these steps into my final project. To explore my project from start to end, visit:
https://aemichalowski.github.io/Data-Visualization-Portfolio/Final_Project_Part_1
https://aemichalowski.github.io/Data-Visualization-Portfolio/Final_Project_Part_2
https://carnegiemellon.shorthandstories.com/strengthening-digital-infrastructure-and-telehealth-capabilities-for-a-healthier-rural-america/index.html
https://aemichalowski.github.io/Data-Visualization-Portfolio/
Moving from part 2 to my final project In part 2 of the final project, I conducted three user interviews to better understand how my audience would perceive, interpret, and react to my story. Based on the results of these interviews, I developed a list of nine important modifications to implement in part 3. As I transformed my wireframe into a full story, I implemented these modifications within the context of the evolving story. In each of the sections below, I briefly explain how I incorporated by feedback from part 2 into the final story.
Initially, I included a visualization that showed bar plots for several health outcomes measured along many different scales in the same grid of charts. My users found this confusing, so I initially decided to split the data into multiple smaller charts. However, as I worked through my story, I realized I wanted to focus more on the impacts of chronic diseases in rural communities. While raw prevalence data did address some aspects of chronic disease, I found that data on the rural-urban differences in mortality due to many chronic diseases provided a clearer image of the scale of impact chronic diseases have on the lifespan. Additionally, the mortality data contained measurements that utilized the same scale. This allowed me to combine the data into a grouped column chart rather than splitting the data into several individual charts.
In my wireframe for part two, I included a visualization about provider shortages in rural areas followed by a visualization of health risk factors in rural areas. My users found that the story would flow better if these two visualizations were reordered as the provider shortages information flowed well into the next section which focused on how telehealth overcomes access issues. I implemented this change by switching the order of the visualizations. Additionally, I decided to separate the information on healthcare access into its own distinct section. While health risk factors and healthcare access are both contributors to poor health outcomes, health risk factors were an extension of my discussion of high rates of chronic diseases while access to healthcare was the main factor that telehealth tries to address. Since my overall story focuses on how to create support for telehealth, so that telehealth can help address healthcare access issues, it made sense to separate access into its own section to communicate the significance of the information.
In part 2, my users advised that the section of my story on telehealth as a solution could be more impactful if it was accompanied by a visual. As a relatively short section without any visual components, it was easily looked over, but this would be problematic as this section serves as the bridge between the first and second half of the story. To address this issue, I created an infographic with icons representing each of the major benefits of telehealth for rural communities. The use of color and images will help keep the reader’s attention and break up the text.
Both I and my readers found my legend unclear for the maps I provided in part 2. In Tableau, you cannot directly label the center point of a two scaled legend. As such, the labels were confusing and did not clearly delineate between the classes I was trying to show (< 25 MBPS, >25 MBPS). I worked to create a an image of an appropriate legend and incorporate it into my Tableau dashboard to improve clarity.
As recommended by one of the users, I changed the title of the visualization to ‘Urban Providers have been Using Telehealth for Longer than Rural Providers’ as my users were not gaining the intended meaning of the graph from the original title. Since Flourish does not allow you to use a separate color scheme for each stacked bar, I made a color scheme from the teal that I used for the broadband visualization. Since both visualizations concerned the utilization of technology, this reinforced the idea that the teal color should be associated with technological data.
The users recommended that I include links to resources for some of the policies in my story. I incorporated these as well as several other links into the story to more clearly cite information and share resources with the readers.
Similarly to my efforts for the benefits of telehealth section, I designed an infographic that incorporated feedback from my users to include more iconography and visuals for the section. Specifically, the visualization lays out each step of the call to action and associates that step with a representative visual that reinforces the states action.
To incorporate more visuals into my story, I included two photographs and several infographics. Some infographics included call out statistics to emphasize important statistics that I wanted the reader to notice like in the case of the closing hospital infographic. Other infographics simply contained visuals that reinforced the text information and helped break up longer sections of text
My audience is local level public health officials and community advocates. Compared to some other audiences, I realized that this group would likely want more evidence and detail to guide them in implementing change. Public health officials and local advocates need to be able to support the decisions and stances when working with other stakeholders or gathering support for new projects. As such, I wanted to make sure that I provided clear and detailed information. Similarly, I focused on using sources that would be well respected by that community such as government organizations and well renowned public health organizations (CDC, FCC, RuralHealthInfo). One of the most significant changes I made in response to my audience was including a sub-narrative throughout the story that encouraged the user to reflect on their own community. When I first finished my draft of the final project, I realized that much of the story was focused on rural people across America even though I acknowledged in the introduction and conclusion that each community needs its own unique solutions. I brainstormed several ideas for making this story more relevant to the local level. While I considered utilizing a persona, it was difficult to design a persona that represented the concept of uniqueness as creating a persona, by definition, establishes the character of that person. Eventually, I decided to weave a series of reflection questions throughout the story that ask the reader to reflect on the information they have just learned and think about how they have seen the aspects of rural health disparities, barriers to access to healthcare, and barriers to telehealth in their own community. At the end of each section, I included questions about the reader’s community. (e.g. ‘What health conditions have the greatest impact on your community?’) These questions built upon each other along the way and eventually culminated in the call to action. I felt that the inclusion of the questions prepared the reader for the call to action by urging them to consider their community’s needs which aligns with the first step of the call to action during which they conduct a community needs assessment. Additionally, it kept a local focus even when much of the data was aggregated at higher levels. This would help my target audience to feel more involved.