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.
VizHealth is a collaborative project developed by the University of Michigan and the Robert Johnson Wood Foundation. This tool allows users to choose from 54 original data visualizations which have been tested through research amongst the general public. Utilizing The Wizard tool allows users to figure out what the primary goal for communicating the risk is and whether their audience needs to understand the basic idea or to remember exact risk numbers.
Figure 1. The Wizard tool from Visualizing Health.
Based on the answer to these two questions, the tool will display graphics that best match your needs. These images can then be modified to fit your own data. You can also browse through the gallery according to specific tags to find the most effective visualization for you. This is a great tool that can be used by anyone from students to professionals as these graphics have already been tested and proven effective to convey information to the general public. There is also an external link to an Icon Array Generator provided by the University of Michigan Risk Science Center that users can utilize to create their own custom images.
Figure 2. Gallery of 54 graphics that can be downloaded from Visualizing Health. Results shown for raise or lower concern and gist understanding tags.Figure 3. Racial disparities in rates of disease visualization from Visualizing Health. Users can choose to download the original image or view the PDF file detailing design specs, testing methods and results for that specific image.
Fig. 4 External link to Icon Array Generator from the University of Michigan Risk Science Center.
This site appears to be made with only good intentions. I like that the website chose not to host the public’s graphs, being they could be inaccurate and lead to a lot of disinformation. This site can be useful to help the general public have more understanding of how their personal decisions can impact their health. Many people are unaware of how they have affected their overall health through positive or negative decisions.
Here we can see that anyone can use these graphs, and the creators would like to know how we’re using them. It is made clear that completed graphs are to be used for the users’ own objectives, and not for the website’s.
The site used information gained through surveys to test the effectiveness of their images.
3 tools were used to test the effectiveness of their images. This shows that the makers of this site are serious about getting the best possible images out to the public.
The site helps to bring risk factors to light with easily digestible infographics to choose from.
The user is able to choose options from the panel to make it easier to find a template.
The design of the site is user-friendly. A person not well-versed in technology could easily make some digital graphics from this site. There appears to be some lack of variety in the risk calculator, however. I noticed that the risk calculator’s youngest age group option was 30-34. If we wanted to use the risk calculator for an age group younger than 30, the option would not be available.
These are not all the risk factors to take into account for a patient, but it is a decent general overview to start with for plotting data.
The Visualizing Health Website is a great tool to use as it is very easy to navigate. This website allows you to create infographics regarding health as well as a way to learn information about their health. There are four sections: About, The Wizard, Browse the Gallery, and Using Visualizing Health.
How We Created Our Images, About
The About page is an introduction to the site. This section explains how to use Visualizing Health, some background to how they created their images, as well as who they are. I found this to be a great tool because it is important to understand where the information is coming from and if they are a reliable tool to use.
The Wizard
The second section of this website is The Wizard which allows you to search for specific infographic designs based on two questions. These include your primary goals and whether you want it to be general or specific. Once you select a goal, they even give you an example as well as a point to consider. This feature truly helps you understand the difference between the various goals and allows you to make the best choice in order to fit your own individual needs.
Screenshot of Browse the Gallery section
The gallery contains hundreds of charts and graphs based on your goals, wants, and needs. On the left hand side, you have the ability to filter your searches through there. These options include “My goal”, “Details or gist”, “Data I have”, “Health conditions”, and “Graphic type”. This section displays many different styles of graphics according on your own specific goals.
Using Visualizing Health, Risk Calculator
The last section of the website is a how-to page. There are options on the left side (see picture above) which explain how to select the correct image and how to adapt that image as well. This is a great addition for those who are beginners and would like some more help.
Conclusion
This is a great tool for any and all health professionals, including myself. The ability to filter and sort through hundreds of data visualizations is super helpful. It is amazing that there is now a site geared more towards a specific audience. There is a ton of information out there on the internet and it can be difficult to navigate. Visualizing Health seems like a great site I can see myself using.
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!
This week I had the pleasure of exploring VizHealth.org, a data visualization site for the medical field run by the University of Michigan. My initial impressions on the site were mixed at best, as I was not sure how useful a site categorizing visualizations specific to the medical field would be to other areas. I am happy to say that this impression was completely untrue and I will most likely use VizHealth as a reference for any future infographic projects.
A Brief Synopsis
The opening page of VizHealth
VizHealth serves as a database detailing a wide variety of infographic examples and their potential uses. The two main features of the site are its gallery of infographic examples and, more importantly, a search wizard for finding infographic designs. Given the wide range of designs and searchable tags the site presents, they thankfully provide a simple but concise guide on how to navigate the site and attribute any of designs for your own use.
The VizHealth Wizard
Serving as the main attraction of the site, the VizHealth wizard is an easy to use tool that allows you to quickly search for specific infographic designs based on a variety of criteria.
When I first viewed the wizard, I was surprised at how simplified the search criteria were. The eight primary goals were easy to understand while also being as non-specific as possible so that you could apply them other datasets that were not medical related.
Selecting a graphic style also provided a short example of how the described graphic would be used and poses several questions that might help you confirm whether or not you choose the correct category. I found this to be a very useful addition as I had difficulty fully understanding the difference between the second and third to last options on the list. The filters for exact numbers and basic concepts were also useful features for determining graphic styles based on whether the graphic is meant for the general public or a more professional audience.
The Graphics Gallery
While I found the Wizard to be helpful overall if you are looking to design an infographic, I was much more interested in the actual graphics browser that accompanies it. This browser displayed about 50 different styles of graphics that all feel under the purpose categories that the Wizard describes. While there were quite a few styles that I was familiar with, there were also significant number that were new to me or that I had never really considered to be infographics.
For example, we all have most likely seen this table at a doctor’s office and I had never realized it might be considered an appropriate way of displaying data. A variety of the presented graphics directly address this issue of determining if a graphic is appropriate for conveying certain types of data and the impacts they have had historically.
The “How did it do?” tab is the perfect addition to the site, as it allowed me to learn more about how well these different styles performed and any issues that arose from their use.
Final Thoughts
Overall, VizHealth seems to be perfect tool to get a wide-scale idea of the various styles of infographics that have been used in the past and provides fantastic information on how effective each is at their prescribed role. The Wizard is a great jumping off point for designing infographics when you are unsure of what kinds of visualizations are appropriate for your data set. I will definitely be using this site as a resource for when I have to
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.
When it comes to a person’s health, having the right data can make a world of difference. But sometimes it’s hard to make sense of the data when it isn’t condensed. What does it mean when the doctor says their patient’s blood pressure is X-over-Y? Will this medication do more harm than good? What should a patient to do reduce their risk factors?
This week, I paid a visit to Visualizing Health (VizHealth), a data visualization style guide specifically designed for communicating health data. Going into this project, my main concern was COVID-19, so I hoped that they had at least some content related to the coronavirus.
First Impressions
The home page for VizHealth.
When I arrived at the VizHealth home page, the first thing I noticed was the University of Michigan logo. I moved my mouse over it and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation logo, but there were no links to either program. Other than that, the page itself had a simple design with a limited color palette and several key links.
About VizHealth
VizHealth results from a collaborative effort between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Michigan Center for Health Communications Research. Their goal is to better communicate data for a variety of health issues through numerous scientific studies. In turn, the VizHealth team hopes that the graphics they designed will provide inspiration to other health data visualization designers who want to tell a different story with their data.
At the top of the “About VizHealth” page, they include a brief video detailing their mission and methods:
At the core of the program is the data visualization wizard, where users answer a few questions to help them select the right graphic for what they want to convey to their audience. Then, there’s the visualization gallery, which contains a variety of graphics depicting different design concepts. Finally, VizHealth’s resources page includes a sample risk calculator and a short comic detailing two real-world applications of health visualization.
The Wizard (of VizHealth)
The first tool on the site is the Data Visualization wizard. Two questions greeted me when I opened the wizard: “What is your primary goal for communicating this specific piece of risk information?” and “Do people need to know or remember exact risk numbers or is it enough for them to get the basic idea (the gist) about the risk?”. Put in simpler terms, the wizard asked me for the purpose of my data and how much of said data I wish to convey to my audience.
For the first question, the wizard gives explanation tooltips for each choice to help users decide what story they want to tell with their data. For example, the second option details risk awareness, and they use a measles outbreak as their source. They also ask the user to consider if they meant to tell a different story; clicking the second option in the tooltip redirects them to another choice. Once I’ve made my selection, the site brought me to a confirmation page where I can continue onto the visualization gallery (discussed below) or change my answers.
Visualization Gallery
VizHealth’s visualization gallery holds 54 pieces of data visualization examples for users to browse, filter, and examine. Immediately, I found myself checking off filters to sort through the examples provided, though I was somewhat disappointed when I saw that there was no option to display COVID-19-related visualizations.
The design I chose pulled information from a 2014 measles statistic report. It compared annual measles cases reported from Brooklyn to nationwide measles cases.
Using this as a design template, I decided to pull monthly COVID-19 statistics for New Jersey and compared them to the national cases reported. As of September 24, COVID-19 cases are slightly increasing when compared to numbers from the previous month. One possible explanation for the increase could be attributed to Labor Day crowds and people disregarding CDC guidelines for social distancing and wearing masks.
This image is based on original research and designs from Visualizing Health, a collaborative project between the University of Michigan and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation made publicly available via Creative Commons license. Our use of this image should not be considered an endorsement from Visualizing Health. For more information, visit www.vizhealth.org.
Resources from VizHealth
Finally, VizHealth provides a list of resources on how to use their content as well as some interactive tools. The first thing I saw was a comic depicting a diabetes researcher, Melanie, as a sort of data-visualization superhero with an illustrator fox sidekick. It was rather cheesy but it also showed how health visualization can help ordinary people better understand their risk factors.
While on the subject of risk factors, VizHealth also has a risk factor calculator that users can interact with to determine what daily habits impact their health.
I had my father, a casual smoker at age 70, enter some answers into the calculator. He thought the design of the graphic was neat, but when I told him that it meant that he was 30% at risk of developing cardiovascular disease, he simply said to me, “Well, there’s a 70% chance I won’t get cardiovascular disease.” Needless to say, I insisted that he consult a doctor about his risk factors, specifically his smoking habits.
My father’s results from entering information into the VizHealth risk calculator.
VizHealth also provides a link to an icon array generator (depicted below) that users can interact with.
Conclusion
Looking around VizHealth and pulling inspiration from the visualizations provided was a fun activity, but I think the program can truly benefit from including more issues such as mental health and COVID-19. Even more so, it would also be interesting to see more interactive tools added to the site, like a free-to-use template generator. If there are any other health issues that arise, I’ll be sure to use VizHealth to learn more.
