OurCORONA

Inspiration

Data overload is common when it comes to looking at COVID-19 statistics. We noticed that COVID-19 data is somewhat imperfect and has already been sliced and diced a multitude of different ways by various sources, but that depicting the data on such grand scales often diminishes the importance of what each number represents and even numb people to the severity of the situation. We want to help personalize this data and bring a humanized aspect to it.

What it does

In our application an avatar is generated to represent each statistical demographic category as a person who has been directly impacted by COVID-19. To relate a face to statistics, the application displays some simple data that pertains to that sex and age group, hopefully helping the user to empathize with the data and encouraging them to do their part to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

While the interface and statistics are simple they allow a user to quickly understand how people like them or their loved ones are affected rather than overloading them with big and un-relatable numbers.

How we built it

We chose to build our project in Framer Web, a design and code hybrid tool that integrates React components to produce functioning code prototypes capable of data fetching and user interaction. Our team has experience with Framer’s desktop app, but we wanted to try a new approach with the new Framer Web technology because it gave us an interesting way to collaborate live on code and design. As a team with a designer, Framer gave us a way to work better together since it included design and code in a way that was manageable for both the people familiar with code and our designer. Framer web also gave us the benefit of easily allowing us to collaborate remotely, something especially important during a pandemic.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was diving into new technologies that we weren't as familiar with. While Framer is a great prototyping tool, we ran occasional code sharing conflicts in their workflow.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Researching and building a useful tool - entirely remotely. We really hope that this can be a useful tool to help people evaluate the world around them.

What we learned

That there are a lot of factors that impact Covid-19 spread.

What's next for OurCORONA

The next steps for our application would be to increase empathy by generating a name for the face and relating the stats to the name since a name is more personal than just a face.

Many COVID-19 charts gloss over projections making users look more into “What are my chances of getting COVID today?” instead of “What are my chances of getting COVID in in the next few if we continue on this path?” When overloaded with data, it is easy to overlook that the rates will compound if preventative efforts are not made to slow the virus. We believe giving them a forecast of their risks will increase their determination to take the proper safety measures.

Another track we want to explore is estimating how likely community spread might impact us through the people that we care about. This approach is explored in an ObservableHQ notebook that we developed while exploring the data.