PROJECT NAME: HealthyDesign.City
ROLE: UX Researcher
DURATION: 1 year (June 2021 – June 2022)
TEAM MEMBERS:
- Co-Directors – Jeffrey Brook, Dany Doiron, and Eleanor Setton
- Communications: Allan McKee
- Geospatial Specialist: Andre Redivo
- Administration: Natalia Calijornes
-UX Team: Evan Rees, Peter Luo, Luba Leong, Amanda Sim, Roya Adeli, Ramya Manikumar
HealthyDesign.City is a research initiative funded and lead by the The Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium (CANUE), one of Canada’s largest health network databases.
HDC's focus was on making two web-enabled tools, one for policy makers/public health professionals (HealthyPlan.City), which was designed to be a data analysis and reporting tool, and the other for the general public (Healthy.Place.City) that was designed to be a public outreach and education tool.
Featured in The Toronto Star, open deployment of the HealthyPlan tool this past December will over time allow users to be more aware of the general health of their neighbourhoods and communities.
The Problem
With 9 out of 10 Canadians expected to be urban dwellers by 2050, there is an immense opportunity to (re)design cities in ways that improve wellbeing and reduce health inequalities.
HealthyDesign.City has taken steps to implement standardized ways of tracking urban-built environment determinants of health, environmental equity, and people’s lived experiences of their neighbourhoods.
Recruitment and Methodology
A total of 66 participants were recruited, the different demographics depicted to the left.
Testing methodology consisted of:
– 1 hour long remote testing session over Zoom
– 3 activities with a variety of tasks around specific functions of the tool
– using think-aloud process, determined pain points and areas of confusion of the tools
Results and Analysis
Both the HealthyPlace and HealthyPlan tools were tested and analyzed separately, however both underwent the same criteria for analysis:
- participants' overall impressions of the tool
- the overall usability of the tool
- functionality of the site elements.
While our team tested and researched both the HealthyPlan.City and HealthyPlace.City tools, the focus of the remainder of this case study will be on HealthyPlan.City. Updates on HealthyPlace.City will be added once it has been launched to the public.
Overall Impressions
HealthyPlan.City participants were asked a series of questions to determine their level of understanding of the concept of the tool.
- - Interactive Visual Map where the red gradient represents 'Unfavourable' and blue gradient represents 'Favourable'
- - Demonstrates how different demographics relate to different Built Environments in different areas
- - Allows for comparisons across different geographic levels and locations
- - Helps identify areas that are struggling with unfavourable conditions
- - Focuses on Canadian cities; and
- - Focuses on Equity.
Participants were also asked which of the functions they believed would be the most important and pivotal to the tool:
- 11 mentions of the map and its ability to present information visually
- - 6 mentions of the ability to make comparisons on multiple geographical levels. E.g., between cities, between city and national, and between blocks
- - 5 mentions of the export function. In cases where participants were able to explore the export function, multiple participants mentioned they wished it could export the map view they are currently on.
Beyond what features they found the most important, participants were also asked which features could be removed. Participant answers indicated that no elements of the site were deemed extraneous or unimportant.
Overall Usability
Our team evaluated overall usability of the site using quantitative and qualitative methods. Participants were asked a variety of questions to assess ease of use and effectiveness of the tool in accomplishing tasks.
Participant responses showed that a majority of respondents (67.6%) found the tool to be overall somewhat easy or very easy (21.6%) to use. The follow-up question asked participants what they would recommend to make the tool easier to use. Some of the main suggestions that were mentioned include:
- explaining the graphs
- adding a glossary
- bringing forth the Methods page
- adding a tutorial for first-time users on how to use the tool
Participant responses for this question revealed that a majority of respondents thought that this tool was either reasonably effective (37.8%) or very effective (59.5%) in informing urban planning and public health policy by identifying neighbourhoods and populations with less access to healthy built environments.
Respondents also mentioned that this tool:
- democratizes information by making data available
- provides the analysis for the user
- and that this tool is unique in the market.
Site Elements
After evaluating the overall impressions and usability of the site, our team then focused on specific, key features of the site:
- The initial introduction to the site
- Map view
- Dropdown menus
- Graphs and populations summary
- Learning Hub page
- Methods page
For each of these features, our team asked participants questions to assess expected functionality vs. perceived/actual functionality. From this, we then asked what recommendations they could provide to improve upon these features, which we then as a team classified as 'long-term' or 'short-term' fixes during our analysis.
Initial Introduction
To best represent the data results, we combined the following sections of the site:
- - Initial pop-up introduction with email sign-up
- - Equity and inequity description at top left
- - Export View Function (PDF and CSV)
The top two recommendations to improve the general introduction to Healthy Plan were:
- 1. Add definitions of favourable, unfavourable, equity, and inequity to provide clarity to new users.
- 2. Include examples of situations where unfavourable inequity exists compared favourable inequity.
Map View
After the users have agreed to the terms and conditions on the landing page of Healthy Plan, they are redirected to the main webpage of HealthyPlan. The user interface (UI) of this webpage consists of a web GIS map output with the abilities to:
- - Change the map scale by zooming in and out of the default scale,
- - Switch between favourable, unfavourable and combined views of the selected criteria and location, and
- - Alter the unit of geography (e.g planning zones) by which to summarize the data on the map.
- There were two most common suggestions for improvement from the sample:
- 1. Most often, the sampled users inquired about the source of the GIS map layers featured in Healthy Plan, so that they can locate and download them to use with other GIS software, such as ArcGIS, QGIS or a corporate GIS platform.
- 2. Additionally, the sampled population wants the ability to compare the selected criteria for two cities at a time. This could be achieved by allowing users to toggle more than one city from the selection panel. Then, a second map view on the same webpage would be added, so that the user could compare and contrast the phenomenon of the same BE factor and demographic group for two locations.
Dropdown Menus
The dropdowns, located in the left-hand banner of the screen, provide users three options that they can use to filter the map view by city, built environment factor, and demographic group. Changing any of these selection criteria will change the data layers visible in the map view.
Suggestions from participants regarding these dropdown menus included:
- 1. Feeling confused as to what some of the terms in the dropdown menus entailed. For example, “non-car paths” was thought to be an ambiguous term. To resolve this, it is suggested to provide users with a detailed glossary of terms that explain what each term means and encapsulates.
- 2. The terminology available in the dropdown menus was seen as limited. Many participants gave suggestions on what terminology should be added.
- 3. Participants also mentioned wanting the ability to aggregate all of the demographic or built environment factors. It is suggested to include an “All” option under both demographic and built environment factors so that users are able to view a sum of all options.
Graphs and Population Summary
The graphs are located in the right-hand banner of the tool below the population summary for the 3 selections of the dropdowns in the right-hand banner (City, Built Environment, and Demographic).
In the beta version of HealthyPlan that was used for usability testing, three graphs were shown: all 3 graphs had the % dissemination block on the y-axis, which indicates the percentage of the dissemination blocks across Canada that fall within the respective deciles (ranked from 0-10) on the x-axis. The x-axis for the graphs each show 1) the demographic ranking scale, the built environment ranking scale, and the favourable equity score ranking scale.
Based on the suggestions listed by participants above, the majority of confusion and pain points for the graphs were mainly centred around terminology and lack of explanations. '
Not all users using HealthyPlan will have a thorough enough understanding of GIS to be able to decipher the graphs based solely on the technical jargon and visual representation in the graphs. In order to mitigate this, our team suggested adding in an explanation blurb at the top of the banner to clarify what the x- and y- axis mean, which could be coupled with moving the methods section to a more accessible placement.
Learning Hub Page
The Learning Hub page is a starting point for users to find more information about how the various Built Environment factors that have been used in the tool affect health. The page allows users to navigate through the four built environment factors and read more about the metric, how it affects health and who is affected. The format consists mainly of text with in-text links to sources as a means for professionals to use this page as a starting point to find more information.
There were a number of reasons brought up across the participants for what they would use the Learning Hub pages for, such as:
- 12 mentions of using the information to provide reasoning for decision making and inform policy change
– 7 mentions of using the information to engage and inform the public
- 6 mentions of using the information for research. Although the actual information presented may already be known to the participant, the Learning Hub serves as a source of academic sources and references for participants to research and cite themselves
- 5 mentions of using the information to learn more about these subject matters personally
From these observations on the purpose and overall functionality of the section, participant recommendations included:
- reformat the in-text hyperlinks to a few words instead of entire sentences and underlining the links, and that a pop-up should be added to let users know that there are in-text links to sources
- add a resource list at the bottom of the page which helps researchers quickly see the sources and verify the credibility. In order to increase credibility it is suggested that information about who this tool is created by and when the data was collected
- a long term recommendation would be to provide more Canadian rural and urban examples as well as sources.
Methods Page
The methods page provides information about the Built Environment Factors, Demographic data, Equity Scores and Urban areas.
Starting with the Demographic Data, this section includes information about what are dissemination blocks and areas and how they were ranked.
Next, the Built Environment Factors gives an in depth description about the datasets that were considered for each metric along with data sources.
The third section deals with the Equity Scores which provides users with more information about how the graphs were created.
And lastly the section that deals with Urban Areas gives users more information on population sizes of the areas considered.
Quantitative analysis of responses to survey questions asked to participants regarding Methods page.
Three (3) modifications were highly recommended for this section:
- The first short term recommendation was to add reasons for why the various units of measurement were chosen for the data sets along with converting the distance measurements into walking time so that readers can easily relate to the information
- The second recommendation is to expand more on the data sets considered and add citations for the sources
- The last recommendation is a long term recommendation where it is suggested that more factors be included in the data sets to make the metrics more detailed.
Conclusion
To summarize, we conducted 38 usability tests of the HealthyPlan tool. From the outset, it became clear that the overall reception to the tool was positive. However, most participants found the graphs hard to interpret and some of the terminology to be confusing. Moreover, they recommended improvements to the navigation, visual aspects, content, and format of the map view, learning hub pages, and method page.
Key Takeaways: Short-Term
- Include description of built environments factors and demographics from the dropdown menus as they can be ambiguous
- Add glossary of terminology, including definitions for favourable and unfavourable inequity for clarity
- Include “All” option for demographics dropdown menu and built environment dropdown menu in map view so that users have the option of viewing an aggregate of the data
- Change map colour for no-data regions from light green to gray-scale for improved comprehension
- Explain the purpose and function of the graphs and their x- and y-axes
- Add a resources or reference list to the bottom of the Learning Hub pages, with information on the source of the links to help improve credibility
- Reduce the length of the hyperlinks in the Learning Hub pages from a full sentence to a couple words to help with accessibility
- Expand on what data is considered for each built environment factor in the Methods page
Key Takeaways: Long-Term
– Create a user tutorial or guide that is available to all users so that they can better understand how to navigate the tool,