Integrating human-centered design in public health data dashboards: lessons from the development of a data dashboard of sexually transmitted infections in New York State

Objective The increased availability of public data and accessible visualization technologies enhanced the popularity of public health data dashboards and broadened their audience from professionals to the general public. However, many dashboards have not achieved their full potential due to design complexities that are not optimized to users' needs. Material and Methods We used a 4-step human-centered design approach to develop a data dashboard of sexually transmitted infections for the New York State Department of Health: (1) stakeholder requirements gathering, (2) an expert review of existing data dashboards, (3) a user evaluation of existing data dashboards, and (4) an usability evaluation of the prototype dashboard with an embedded experiment about visualizing missing race and ethnicity data. Results Step 1 uncovered data limitations and software requirements that informed the platform choice and measures included. Step 2 yielded a checklist of general principles for dashboard design. Step 3 revealed user preferences that influenced the chart types and interactive features. Step 4 uncovered usability problems resulting in features such as prompts, data notes, and displaying imputed values for missing race and ethnicity data. Discussion Our final design was accepted by program stakeholders. Our modifications to traditional human-centered design methodologies to minimize stakeholders' time burden and collect data virtually enabled project success despite barriers to meeting participants in-person and limited public health agency staff capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusion Our human-centered design approach and the final data dashboard architecture could serve as a template for designing public health data dashboards elsewhere.