This website and the way it works came at a very interesting time. My dad is currently going through health complications and frequently complains about the feedback that doctors give people such as him. It is not intuitive, to my dad, and many other people. He would have to go to another doctor in order to hear another explanation. Which, realistically, should never have to happen. Especially when health care isn’t always free. And it’s not necessarily anyone’s fault.
Instantly, someone like me looks for verbatim data, and where the concern should be so I appreciated the tiny quiz. I personally fail to see the benefits in “gist understandings.” Perhaps if you legitimately do not care about your health, but I’m not sure.
The Risk calculators are, without a doubt, my favourite part, and finding intuitive ways to share calculated figures and a beneficial way is a goal of mine. There were a few boring graphs.There is always some difficulty with displaying very small or large numbers, but imagination is key.
There should always be a balance of visual data and practical knowledge, but In general, seeing more stuff like this may lead to some benefit.
The first thing that stood out the most after visiting the site and watching the video is the visualizing color and the color coordination of the site. As you can see below, the theme color of the site is very dark, almost pitch black, however, the main topics are highlighted in neon colors. Which is extremely helpful for individuals with astigmatism and light sensitivity like myself.
Visualizing health is a scientifically style guide for communicating health data. The homepage of the site contains about four different sections, the about section, the wizards section, browse the gallery section and using visualizing health section .Hence, first and foremost, I visited the ” About” section, in order to learn the purpose of the website. There I was able to watch a video called ” About This Project”, which elaborated on what the project is about and it’s purpose.
According to my understanding the purpose of this website is help individuals learn the right information, along with images for better understanding. Visualizing health also contains a sample risk calculator with design concepts.
Furthermore, after reading the ” About” section, I switched to the ” Wizard” section, where I had to answer some questions in regards to what my primary goal is to learn about the risk factors. In the same page, I was also able to choose whether I wanted to the basic ideas for the risk factors or the exact numbers. In my opinion, these questionnaires are very helpful for first time visitors of the site and also for individuals like myself, who just wants to know what this site is about.
Ultimately, I switched to the gallery section. Which happened to be my favorite section out of the four due to the amount of info graphics and easy to understand information’s. These infographics not only contained primary information but also went in depth about health disparities between different age group, racial disparities in rates of disease, side effects, etc.
In conclusion, my experience with this site has been great so far. I even bookmarked it, as I am curious to learn about about these matters and also about the site. Would recommend as a great tool for health informatics and infographics.
About the Project Page, detailing the what and why.
I personally found the first page of the website a little bothersome, mostly due to the speed at which all of the available widgets appeared. I thought it was kind of annoying to have to wait for everything to load and then load again. Seemed counterproductive for someone trying to do research.
All of the gallery images on this site are available for widespread use through a creative commons license. You are free to duplicate, adapt, and modify the images as you see fit—we just ask that you abide by the Creative Commons Attribution terms.
In a collaboration study with the University of Michigan Center for Health Communication and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, vizhealth was born! This website is an ambitious way to communicate what we need to know about our bodies in the simplest of forms. Data is what drives us to come to decisions. When we receive news about our health, those of us who don’t have medical degree’s are dumbstruck and don’t know what steps to take next. Visualize Health is your next step.
“This site contains 54 examples of tested visualizations – that is, graphic displays of health information that we’ve evaluated through research among the general public. Our objective was to create a gallery of beautiful and easy-to-make-sense-of graphs, charts, and images that effectively communicate risk information. Health data that makes sense.”
vizhealth.org
Here are some of the features from the site!
Using the ‘Wizard Tool’, you can edit the site to specify what your will help you in the most effective way. The gallery of images on the site are helpful visual aids that really help you understand your needs.
The risk calculator is very useful and shows off the newest and best designs for infographics. Combined with stories from other people, you can get a real idea of the help you need!
If you want to become a serious Infographic Designer, www.vizhealth.org is the place you should start.
Visualizing health is a website that contains graphic displays of health information that they’ve validated through research among the general public. Visualizing Health was developed by the University of Michigan, with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This website states that data can help people make better decisions about their health. There is a “wizard tool,” a gallery of images, a sample risk calculator, and a real world story. This site contains 54 examples of tested visualizations. The goal of this site was to beautifully display health information.
The Wizard Tool/ Gallery
This tool is designed to help you learn how to find the right type of display to fit your needs. The wizard asks you to choose the information you would like to know more about. I selected my options and the wizard provided me with some data. The picture below is what The Wizard looks like. The second picture shows the data visualizations that came up, which is called “The Gallery”. There are many different options and ways that data is displayed. You are able to choose which way you would like the data presented to you. The wizard will show you the same data many different ways. This is very helpful.
Conclusion
Overall, I think that the Visualizing health website is very beneficial when learning about data visualization. There is a lot of information to view on this website. You can view data 54 different ways, which is extremely helpful.
When I first opened Visualizing Health homepage, I noticed the title graphic and the yellow text. The title isn’t overall complicated and easy to read. Looking closer, I realized that all the yellow text are links to other pages of the site, licenses, and emails. All are clickable links that a person can use to get information from and help recognize what they can click on.
Screenshot of video
Finding information about the project was very easy and they even added a video that helps explain their goals, how they put the wizard together and how was involved with the project.
The Wizard
The wizard was, to me, fun to use. It started out with 2 two questions, what is your primary goal of the infographic and how specific you want it to be. This is great because it help narrow down your choices and makes jumping into making an infographic less overwhelming. Starting small and specific is best and then you can always work up.
First page of the wizard
It then brought you to the gallery with samples of graphic based on the specifications that you chose. On the right hand side (screenshot on left) shows a menu with the same parameters that you were giving at first, with yours selected. Below your first options are more specific sections you can chose to help narrow down the type of graphic you need. It can help cater to the type of data you are working with, rather than have a general graphic. You can also select the type of graph you wanted, whether it was a bar graph, table, icon, or pie chart, etc. Using the Wizard was really straight forward and easy to navigate.
Menu for finding graphic
The site also gives tips on how to create icons, use images, and assess risks for the infographic. This site seems especially helpful to people in a medical field or people/companies that want to spread awareness about diseases or other health risks.
I would just like to say that the Visualizing Health Website is a dream come true for all Hospital Marketing departments. This site is very easy to navigate because they made the tabs really simple to understand.
There are four tabs: the about section which is basically the history of the website and their purpose, the Wizard which separated into two main questions, what is the primary goal and whether you want it to be a general idea or specific.
The next part if the gallery that has hundreds of charts and graphs about almost everything health related that one could think of.
The left side of the page is separated into sections and you can filter your searches through there. You can choose what you want you goal to be and what data you want to present. Then towards the end of the filters there is an option to choose what graph time you. This is great because not all graphs fit the needs of your audience and not all of them have the same effect.
The last part of the site is basically a how to page. It explains how to pick the correct image to fit your needs and how to adapt the image when you pick the one to that is the best for you.
The graphs that you can choose from will look like this and when you click on them there is an option to download them. Since these graphs are so specific to some data and research that has been done, they also give you an option to look at that data that is presented in a graph form as an actual PDF document.
In conclusion, this is a gem for all health care professionals including myself. It’s amazing how there is really something out here for everything you could possibly need. This is something I will for sure be using in the future!
I was usually proud about my health. So, I felt relaxed to visit this website. Visualizing Health was a project of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Michigan Center for Health Communications Research. My belief was increased after reading this information.
What I was waiting for not take VizHealth adventure? It was not useless for me to make better decision for my health despite its disclaimer. 6 of candies was not 10, but they were better than nothing, they were not? Also, I could enjoy the knowledge of data visualization in health field.
The authors of website promise that there would be a real- world story to help me to understand how my images would be adapted by visualization. But what should I do to limit my images within so much images in its gallery. Yes, a “wizard tool” was available for me to use, as well as risk calculator.
I started with wizard tool by answer some questions
Ok, the result were here. It was helpful for me to narrow my images by selections of ” My goals, Details or gist, Data I have, Health conditions, and Graphic type” . Two first selections were results from taking Wizard.
Next, I smiled to choose a specific type of graph for displaying my result. Otherwise, I could enter a matrix of health images? Could you have 11 your lovers at the same time? I only chose 1 lover and some friends. I was busy.
Ok, Let’s started with calculate my risk !
After that, I had my Cardiovascular risk level, the score of Health Risk Assessments ( HRA), as well as the translating test results into risk. Unlike secret data, I were available to share with all you. It were looked like…
Did you agree with me that it was important to access our health risk? It was not less useful to understand about health risk factor such as gen, gender, age, health condition, as well as living and working environment. So, the website remined me about attention for variety … These images were looked like…
The benefit of risk reduction and the benefit of positive change were also pointed. These images are looked like…, but not mine…
Some recommendations about treatment choice, specially for color cancer or diabetes were available. But not me… I was Ok!
Finally, I made decision not to visit doctor due to my health…!
More thinking…! 09/28/2020…
I would like to thank authors of the website and my instructor for this opportunity. It is not easy to make ideas about health visualization without their health knowledge and talent, specially their creativeness, organizational and computer skills. The images / infographics are lovely and understandable.
More ever, I was inspired to learn more some health knowledge while answering some questions, as well as how to make these lovely images/ infographics. Also, I got a little experience to determine where is starting point for a difficult math problem.
An interactive website that helps pair visuals to medical information thus making it easier to communicate with patients. The website itself is well organized and is easy to navigate; The University of Michigan also lays out its goals and objectives for the website on the home page.
As I navigated through the website, I found a tab labeled “The Wizard” which asks two questions to help guide users toward an image that helps display the information they want to transmit.
Once past the questions on “The Wizard” then the site guides you to a page that displays multiple colorful images to the right and down the left-hand side is a widget that a user can elaborate more on what they are looking to create.
The generator was for Icon array, which transferred you to another website. On the page, ironarry.com, there were a few questions listed that help generates an icon graph, like posters seen in a doctor’s office. The generator also had options of changing the icon on the chart, male, female, etc.
Being a new user to this website, I decided to try out the calculator, it asked a few simple questions and within seconds I had an easy-to-read visual before my eyes. I was honestly surprised by how simple the chart was to read and I think it is a wonderful tool for people like myself who are usually confused by all the charts and analyze from a doctor’s office.
Overall, I think this website could be helpful to not just medical professionals or patients but to those who are trying to understand and grasp the concept of visual data. I feel like it explains and shows how each type of graph can portray specific knowledge and be used to target consumers in a simple and understandable form. I think what helped me tie in how well visualization can help the brain compute data was manipulating the data on the graphs and seeing it come to life, so to speak, in graph form. Even using the calculator, I was able to insert data I did not quite understand and receive an image that got straight to the point with little to no confusion.
Vizhealth is a website created to help view/explain/visualize health risks and overall help us make decisions over our health. While looking through the website it takes you through steps to get to the visualization that best fits your needs. It shows you various styles of visualization according to questions they ask you (primary goal – awareness, classify risk, differences in risk between groups, degree of risk, and lastly whether the type of visualization basic idea or exact risk number). They also provide a fun comic, risk calculator, and a generator to help view population risks with icons.
The creators of this website have a wizard tool that helps you find the right visual display for you to understand certain health information. This basically helps narrow down the display option to one that fits any need you have. For the wizard at first, I tried the options “To help people classify a risk (as”borderline high,” “below average,” or “excellent.”). and “exact risk numbers” This is one fo the visualizations that popped up for my needs. It shows you the different risk levels and then shows you where you are at. It provides the number for you and you just look for it on the risk levels. For most visuals, it gives you options to download a pdf of the design specifications, testing methods, and results. This is an example of the Generator that helps visualize risk population with icons. I typed in 10 out of 100 people exhibit this property. This highlighted the amount of people that the sentence was about. In gray was the people that didn’t exhibited the property.
