Modern Data Visualization at CDC: Fast, User Tested, and Web Ready by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Objectives

Covid and Monkeypox have made it clear, CDC must tell the data story as it unfolds with interactive visualizations that are mobile-friendly, high-traffic ready, user-tested, and accessible. Our objective was to modernize visualizations at CDC to meet these goals without using any specialized application developers or additional licenses.

Unique Aspects

This project is about visualizing data across the agency as part of CDC’s Digital Communication Modernization and Data Modernization Initiatives. It includes ensuring a unified look across CDC by employing visual design expertise, best practices, and user-tested data and recommendations so that audiences can understand the agency’s intended messages.

We’ve built tools into CDC’s Web Content Management System using an Open source development model which is also integrated with distributed data pipeline to make data update easier.

Metrics

There are approximately 30 visualization types currently available, including various charts, tables, and maps. Over 1000 web-ready interactive visualizations are already available on CDC.gov for topics including COVID-19, Monkeypox, drug overdose, vaccination, and more.

These new tools allow staff to go from final data file to web-ready visualization in under half an hour. Since May 2022, there have been over 8 million views of the Monkeypox data visualization pages on CDC.gov.