Launchpad

  • Role - Product Designer
  • Project Type - Dashboard
  • Duration - 8 months
  • Team - Front and Back-end Developers, Data and Machine Learning Scientists, Public Health Clinicians

Launchpad is a geospatial search engine for planetary and human health, integrating satellites, environmental data, and epidemiological information in real time. It aims to be a platform for a new global pandemic system for threats such as COVID-19.

Why should we care?

Health insurance companies rely heavily on health and predictive analytics, and the healthcare analytics market is predicted to reach $53.65 billion by 2025, and the market size for predictive analytics market is forecasted to be $23.9 billion. More specifically, the geospatial analytics market is predicted to reach $134 billion by 2025.The addressable market for the XY.ai pandemic surveillance platform represents the union of these existing markets. There is also major potential for these markets to expand in response to future public health challenges such as epidemics, syndemics, and pandemics, which will impact health insurers, governments, non-profit organizations, and other entities who will deliver solutions and interventions in this space. The total addressable market for the XY.ai pandemic surveillance solution and related technologies to be in the billions of dollars, due to the contributions and overlap of the mobile health, healthcare analytics, predictive analytics, and geospatial analytics markets.

What should we offer?

Currently, there are no major commercial entities that are developing comparable technologies using the exposome, remote space sensing, deep-learning pipelines, and massively integrated data. While there are several health analytics companies that present geospatial health information (such as ESRI ArcGIS), none directly predict healthcare outcomes with these data.

What was the problem?

Since the client for this project was funded by a large health insurance company, the problem to solve for was already determined: organizing information that helps people understand the risk of place and use it as a tool for generative positive health outcomes. Insurance, pharmaceutical, and digital health companies need a way to identify and assess the risk of a region to help inform their decisions on how to generate positive health outcomes for any community.

Since the user seeks information about COVID-19 related risk factors, they should feel a sense of trust, authority, and transparency in the product. Ultimately, the user should feel like they can rely on the product as a tool to generate decisions based on their specific use case.

User Stories

Given our client, the following user stories were created to best align with their goals for the product:

Analysts at insurance companies need to identify regions with high PM2.5/asthma risk scores to help improve asthma outcomes by targeting educational programs in that region.

Physicians need to identify regions with high PM2.5/asthma risk scores/pediatric populations in order to recruit patients for asthma studies from that region.

Out with the old

Upon starting the project, I annotated an existing prototype using a conventional heuristics and accessibility evaluation to assess the existing framework and features and identify gaps and opportunities for design to address.

Learning about the requirements and overall structure of the current prototype, as well as aligning with product on which features and revisions to prioritize for the next version based on the heuristics evaluation, I created a site map converge the pages and features together.

Design

I decided to look at a divergent set of products that all utilized maps in a significant way in their product or website. Inspired by modern and familiar map styles seen on Google Earth, Patagonia, and the National Geographic, the product needed to have a prominent and clean map interface to tell a cohesive story, and a dedicated space for additional resources and data. The main challenge was designing for added complexity to an interface that needed to have clear hierarchy to remain effective, engaging, and clear to users across major breakpoints (desktop to mobile).

Main features include:

  • Map - a dynamic map interface where users can select for different data types (e.g. disease, demographics, environmental, etc.) to visualize pertinent data for their research. A Vaccine dataset was added as vaccines were beginning to be rolled out during the time of creating the designs.
  • Highlights Sidebar - a live dashboard of most relevant COVID-19 charts, identifying emerging hotspots and resources for people to be safe based on selected geography. An integrated nav bar was added due to feedback from user testing that certain elements weren't readily findable.
  • Ticker Tape - A quick visual summary of trends based on the dataset selected (i.e. the Disease tab will populate disease related data)

The additional Vaccines interface includes:

  • Identifying vaccination sites near you - a dynamic search feature that allows users to search for vaccination sites within a zip code radius
  • Your place in line - a feature that indicates to users their place in line to get the vaccine. This was largely determined at the state level and based on different policies.

Prototypes

Desktop UI

Mobile UI

Project Takeaways

We conducted several guerrilla testing sessions through Maze. The concept of Launchpad as an all-in-one pandemic search engine dashboard was exciting and seemed like a powerful tool for the majority of tested users. The overall visual design of the app was visually appealing and understandable, and the majority liked its interactive (non-static) nature.

Results from usability testing have directed us to design major features including an onboarding screen summarizing Launchpad’s main features, a dedicated vaccine distribution interface, including choice tooltips for transparency, and a nav bar for the sidebar for easier navigation.

Additionally, we were able to identify within the tested group, an even more nuanced level of use cases: the professional, the cautious planner, and the daily tracker, each with their own concerns and needs that weren’t obvious to us before. These use cases would help us prioritize future features.

  • The Professional - Technical knowledge and resources to help better guide their decisions (e.g. vaccine distribution), and the ability to acquire data for personal analysis
  • The Cautious Planner - Wants to know how their day to day life will be affected by the pandemic, clear travel guidelines, and overall relief on knowing travel risk
  • The Daily Tracker - A quick summary of a few choice locations, will likely check multiple times a week and will return to if they have a reason to keep track of a specific place