Assignment #3: Scenarios, Competitive Analysis, and Initial Designs
February 24, 2004

Revised Personas, Revised Task Analysis
Scenario #1      Scenario #2     Scenario #3
Related Work / Comparative Analysis
Initial Design Sketches
Work Distribution Table

The folllowing scenarios are based on a revised project scope of focusing on only a dashboard of indicators for the Healthy Communities Project.

Scenario #1:
Nancy’s current project for her internship at the Center for Children’s Health is to develop programs to educate parents, teachers, and children themselves on the issue of childhood obesity. The childhood obesity problem has exacerbated in recent years in Marin county. Many local public health newsletter and newspaper articles have mentioned the issue and are calling for actions. Nancy goes to the Healthy Communities website, and finds that childhood obesity is presented as a health indicator that needs attention. She reads all related information about the indicator; she reads current news articles, stories, and resources about the issue. She also reviews recent trends and statistics. She further researches on the site to find out what other communities have done, especially what programs they have created to combat this issue. She wants to get suggestions and recommendations from similar programs developed from other communities without duplicating efforts. Based on information from this website, she drafts a teaching program to educate teachers and parents on ways to combat childhood obesity. Since implementing a successful public health requires support from various community groups, Nancy goes back to the Healthy Communities website to email the indicator information to other local public health leaders/professionals /organizations that might be interested in collaborating with her on the teaching program.

Scenario #2:
Marcos Smith needs to do some research on water quality across different communities in the Bay Area. He logins into the system and goes directly to the indicator master list page. He knows the indicator he is looking for is a indicator belonging to the Natural Environment Catagory. After narrowing down to this one catagory, he finds several subcatagories. He is not sure exactly which subcatagory the indicator belongs to, so he decides to use the keyword search tool. By typing the word "water", he gets the link to the "water pollution" indicator. He views the indicator status at different locality levels and across different communtiies. He goes on to read more related information based on all the available links. He comes up with a preliminary analysis based on the findings from this site. He leaves some comments and shares some of the information from his analysis at the site before he logs off.

Scenario #3:
It is now three months since Maurice and his family moved in their new home located near a freeway in Oakland. Their son, Morris, has been sick since last week with symptoms of sneezing, coughing, and itchy eyes. His wife brings him to a doctor and finds out he is suffering from asthma. Maurice is told by the doctor that it might have something to do with the air quality in the living environment. Maurice is searching on Google hoping to learn about asthma, and to learn about the air quality in Oakland. It returns with many results, and he clicks on the one call “Oakland Healthy Communities”. At the top-middle section of the homepage, he sees an eye-catching dashboard with several color-coded indicators on it. He clicks on the one says “Air quality” to lead him to a page with explanations of air quality conditions and factors on the region. He reads about the explanation of information source and feels confident with the credibility of the information. Maurice also uses the search/link function on this page to search for related information on air quality. After reading all the information he wants to learn about, he bookmarks the homepage and prints the air quality indicator page for reference.

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Related Work / Comparative Analysis

System 1 - Official site for Salt Lake City, Residents' Page

Most of the community-based websites do not have health/life-style related indicator/index easily accessible on their site to promote health condition awareness in the community. Even if health/life-style related subjects are available, users are usually presented with very simple information on the subject along with some external links for them to find out information regarding the condition on that particular subject. The Salt Lake City site has two links available under “air quality”; one has to click on Utah Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) Division of Air Quality in order to find out how the city is doing on the subject of air quality. Once the users get to the DEQ page, they have to go through two more steps in order to obtain the city’s air quality reports or any indicators for air quality performance of the city.

• Weaknesses:
  · The system is not proactive enough and lacks the function of making residents aware of health conditions of the community
  · Difficult to search for indicators on different subjects
  · Some indicators may not be available if those links to external sites are not available under the subject
• Strengths:
  · The site is easy to maintain as external links are used to show data for indicators

Indicators - Real Time Map/Data

• Weaknesses:
  · Poor presentation of graph (what is the relationship between the green and blue lines?)
  · Fail to compare data with a standard. Users are presented with numbers with no explanation of how the city is doing (good/fair/bad?) and what different indexes mean
  · Unable to track past history
  · Unable to compare status of indicators across different communities
• Strengths:
  · Has the power to compare different types of air quality indexes on the same page
  

Indicators - Current Air Quality

• Weaknesses:
  · The presentation of the indicators is not eye-catching
  · The table is difficult to understand
  · Explanations of the data in the table are difficult to find (note is located at the bottom of the table)
  · Unable to track past history
• Strengths:
  · Some indicators are color-coded to better differentiate the levels of quality (Unfortunately there is no explanation of which color stands for what level of quality)
  · Indicators for different counties or cities are compared side-by-side on the same table
  · Interpret the data for users (unhealthy/moderate) under the table of “Current Air Pollution Conditions”
  

System 2 - Virginia Center for Healthy Communities (http://www.vahealthycommunities.com/default.asp)

The goal of this website is to create an independent voice for community health issues for residents in the state of Virginia. It has information on health policy decisions related to community health.

The website interface is simple and straightforward, making it easy to understand and navigate. There are three navigational links at the top right hand corner of the interface, but the location makes them hard to be spotted right away. There is also a left navigational bar menu. When one menu item is clicked on, all the sub-menu items will come up underneath it. Some of the menu titles do not relate well to the underneath content. For example, under the menu item “News and Info”, one would assume to find news articles and related information about health programs in Virginia, but surprisingly, the submenus “Forum” for discussion and “Bulletin Board” for announcements come up, as shown in the next graph. One would not have assumed the existence of a discussion forum just by looking at the main menu.

In terms of the information, it is a very educational site with a lot of good information. It has many State public health reports and survey results available, but again you would have to search for them as you do not know that they are available just by looking at the home page. You also have the ability to view indicator reports by zip code and by community, as shown in the next graph, though only local data are found in these reports. All the indicator values cannot be compared across different communities, or compared over time, or compared against national data.

However, much of the site information is not being updated continuously, and old data are still at many places. The discussion forum and bulletin boards are also not being maintained, in fact both links are currently not functional, and there is no indication whether they will be made available again.

The presentation of the information is very plain and dull, there is nothing that really catches your attention and makes you engaging. User can only digest the information, and there is no incentive to do anything about all the community health issues that are being described; no action tool is available for users to get involved and actually make changes. Users can only send an email to the site administrator, and there is no further contact information if a user is interested in a community health project and would like to learn more or become part of it. There is also no search function or site map to help you find any specific information.
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Initial Design Ideas

Design Flow Chart

Design Sketches

Florance's Sketches
Ran's Sketches
Nettie's Sketches

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