Creating a Digital World: Data As Design Material

What Would Your Users Like to Know?

There is so much data available now—and the amount is growing every moment—the question really becomes: What will we do with it all? How will we enable people to find and use the data they need, where and when they need it? This will continue to be an ongoing challenge for UX professionals.

A great example of a transformative digital service that delivers the right data to users—thus, creating a valuable experience for them—is Import Genius, which publishes timely information online about the contents, shipper, and recipient of every cargo container coming into the United States. Within five days of a shipment’s arriving on U.S. shores, the information appears in the Import Genius Web-accessible database. Companies use Import Genius to monitor their competition, identify potential suppliers, and even protect intellectual property rights. Investors and market analysts use it to track companies’ flow of products from overseas sources and see how well the real situation matches what companies, investors, and analysts have announced, expected, or predicted.

Import Genius provides a case study on how a digital service can liberate data and analysis from its gatekeepers. The site gives users the opportunity to bypass the old, official channels. Why wait for the federal government to release a report on imports and exports? You can use Import Genius to download and manipulate the information yourself—and even narrow the information down by industry, product, and company, in a way that’s useful to you. And while import/export data was public before Import Genius came along, it was not easy to access or analyze in a timely way. Whether Import Genius will be a game changer for its users remains to be seen, but the potential it offers for reshaping the way companies partner with their overseas manufacturers, run their logistics operations, and bring their products to market is real.

The increasing availability of public data online—spanning everything from real estate transactions to wills to marriage licenses to census data—means more transformative digital services will soon follow. We can already monitor the political campaign donations of both our friends and complete strangers on the Huffington Post’s Fundrace2008 and even find out about the demographics of our neighborhoods on ZIPskinny.

Possibilities for Data Sharing

The area of public health may hold the greatest potential for transformative data manipulation. For example, during the Salmonella Saint Paul outbreaks that occurred throughout the United States during July and August, 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had difficulty determining the cause—which they originally thought to be tomatoes, but eventually traced to jalepeño peppers originating in Mexico.

The CDC’s difficulty in pinpointing the cause was due in part to

• the complexities of food preparation—When you eat a dish containing many ingredients, it’s hard to know which one made you sick
• a time lag of two to three weeks between the time when people get sick and when it finally gets reported

We can imagine the potential of Who Is Sick?, a Web application that lets people self-report symptoms of illness. While critics of the site charge that only hypochondriacs would use such a service, the site’s information display is mediocre, and self-reported symptoms are not medically useful data, from a public health perspective, the core idea is a great one. If the site or a similar application could integrate data from a variety of sources—such as emergency rooms, doctors’ offices, pharmacies, and personal reports—regarding symptoms of disease and possible causes, it could help government agencies like the CDC reduce the time it takes to pinpoint contaminated food sources or other disease-causing agents. Public health warnings could be more effective, because we could do a better job of tracking things like flu epidemics or the spread of E coli in contaminated beef.

This idea is not a new one. The classic example of an information graphic that depicted a serious outbreak and ultimately saved lives is John Snow’s famous cholera map of London, which located the source of the disease at the Broad Street water pump.

The Problem of Privacy

Along with the ability to access increasing amounts of publicly available data comes a bevy of problems—such as information overload, the inability to find what we want amidst the cacophony of data sources clamoring for our attention, and growing privacy concerns.

A BusinessWeek article on prescription data-mining companies illustrates how data can be a double-edged sword. Surprisingly, our pharmacies’ prescription databases are now part of a commercially available database of prescription data. And the same prescription data that doctors can use to help their patients in emergency situations is also accessible to insurance companies who use it to evaluate a person’s worthiness for health coverage. For example, if insurance companies see prescriptions for conditions that raise red flags, they can factor this into their decision to deny a policy. Our medical history—especially our prescription information—is something we’d like to hold close and for which we have an expectation of privacy. Unfortunately, we now face the possibility that this may no longer be the case.

As we struggle with privacy issues, we can see how data availability will continue to transform business practices and even change our societies and the way we relate to one another. Data availability will raise social and even moral questions, just as the industrial revolution raised social and moral questions about fair labor practices, gender and racial equality, housing and sanitation needs in newly vital cities, and more. In the future, we may see tools that offer to protect our anonymity and manage our reputation become the most sought after digital products. Real data will continue to reveal that our perceptions about companies and people are not always grounded in fact.

Transformative Data

As UX professionals, we will be responsible for not only creating and engineering people’s experiences with this deluge of information, but ultimately determining how people interact with and negotiate all this data. What is paramount is that we begin to consider data as an essential design element. Just as a craftsperson decides what species of wood or type of metal is best suited for the type of product he is building, so, too, will we need to think about choosing which types of data to use in a digital product.

Though it’s often been said about other technological advances, in this age of digital data, our limits truly are governed only by what we can imagine. And it’s up to us, as UX professionals, to determine what to do to make useful information more accessible, while, at the same time, safeguarding our privacy, and to tackle the difficult task of envisioning what we can and should do next.