In Dashboards That Deliver, a new book that highlights some of the world’s most effective and well-designed data dashboards, co-author Jeffrey Shaffer says the Coronavirus Resource Center (CRC), which was designed and maintained by GovEx, along with collaborators throughout Johns Hopkins University, “is one that should now be included when we talk about the top-ranking data visualizations of all time.”
In a chapter dedicated to the CRC, the book notes that from the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the CRC was “a publicly available data source, one of the first and most trusted, often referenced by major newspapers and government entities reporting on COVID-19… Ultimately, the dashboard was viewed more than 2.5 billion times with an added 1 billion hits on the data, making it one of the most viewed dashboards of all time.”
The authors cited the dashboard’s accessibility to a mass audience and the transparency of the underlying data as two of the factors that made it so essential to people around the world.
“The simplicity of the dashboard and the accessibility of the underlying data tables were two primary reasons for the dashboard’s wide adoption and use,” they write. “Remember, the dashboard started as a data source. Then, the team developed the dashboard to make the information more available to the public.”
The chapter on the CRC goes tells the story of its development, highlighting the work of GovEx founder Beth Blauer and GovEx staff members Mary Conway Vaughan and Dr. Sara Bertran de Lis, as well as Dr. Lauren Gardner in Johns Hopkins’ Center for Systems and Science Engineering, who provided the initial underlying data for the dashboard and guided its back-end development.
As the dashboard grew along with the scale of the pandemic, the team building it, which also included GovEx staff Heather Bree and Angel Aliseda, continued to refine it, relying on constant contact with local sources of information, and keeping the public informed of changes in regular blog posts.
In the author commentary that closes the chapter, co-author Steve Wexler reflects on what defined the project: “One thing that stands out more than anything else with this project: integrity. I mean the integrity of the data itself and the integrity of how they presented the data.”
