WastewaterSCAN Dashboard
UI/UX & Visual Design • Desktop & Mobile • 2025
OVERVIEW
"I have it bookmarked and open every day, it's really fantastic."
Problem: WastewaterSCAN came to us with live and historical pathogen data collected from hundreds of wastewater sites across the country. They wanted a way for their internal team to conduct research within the data as well as for the general public to explore and track health trends in everyday life.
Solution: We designed the WastewaterSCAN Dashboard, an interactive platform that visualizes health data across the country in a map summary and advanced chart builder. The result helps users track pathogen trends over time to make smarter decisions for their community or theirselves.
As the lead designer on this project, my team and I:
Defined the visual and interaction design for the dashboard
Collaborated with users like scientists, data engineers, and public health experts
Designed customizable data visualizations that reveal health trends, community comparisons, and temporal changes at many geographic scales
Built a user interface and visual design that balances scientific precision with public accessibility and brand
Created responsive layouts optimized for both desktop and mobile devices
Worked with developers to prototype and refine the product throughout the process
PROBLEM
Turning nationwide wastewater data into an interactive dashboard
To kick off the project, we had the client define what success looked like in their eyes. This is always a helpful way of aligning our expectations at the start of the project as well as getting a better sense of what we are solving. It also serves as a benchmark to measure ourselves by as we progress through the project.
Failure
Success looks like avoiding 100% of these
Disjointed, confusing user experience
Website breaks all the time
Screenshots of charts don't include relevant information
People are re-plotting the data to use for their overviews and sharing with stakeholders
Users are not able to navigate through website or able to understand the main objective of the content
Minimum Success
Success means achieving 100% of these
Data can be viewed as it's available
Export/embed options that are easy to use
Text and info on the website can be updated by WastewaterSCAN (non-techie) team
Users are able to interpret the visualizations easily and make actionable insights
Site is stable
Dashboard allows users to view data as it's available
Target Success
Success means achieving 40–60% of these
UX is intuitive, easy to use, allows users to view and compare data
Website provides a meaningful story and value to the engaged citizen
Our moms can look at the website and know how to interpret the data
Users who oversee multiple sites (national, states, counties) can look at their data together
We like to brag about the website
See below for a screenshot of the actual activity we did with the client in FigJam:
DISCOVERY
Getting to know our users' goals and limitations
To understand who we were designing this product for, we divided and our users into four general buckets and prioritized them. We specifically were interested in what motivates and what limits each of these user groups.
Super User
Admins (Client)
Goals / motivations:
Optimize website to make sharing insights and data with stakeholders quicker and easier
Frustrations / painpoints:
Providing many stakeholders with trends and data insights very quickly
Current process takes time and isn't efficient
Secondary User
Nerdy General Public
Goals / motivations:
Understand health trends at many scopes
Easy to customize and share findings for science communication
Frustrations / painpoints:
Website is not intuitive for finding or sharing insights
Charts are not designed for this audience
Primary User
Public Health Stakeholders
Goals / motivations:
Quickly explore and understand data
Use findings and insights for decision-making
Frustrations / painpoints:
Website exploration is not intuitive for user group
Inherent reliance on humans (admins) to fill in the gaps, answer questions, validate data, etc.
Tertiary User
Academics & Researchers
Goals / motivations:
Find compelling entry point into their own research
Downloading the data directly
Frustrations / painpoints:
Want more freedom to investigate the data with their own tools or workspace
Requesting access to data takes too much time
CHART BUILDER
Creating a customizable chart builder to visualize trends and comparisons
The old dashboard design showed trends for a limited number of diseases but wasn't flexible enough to add new information easily. Our first problem was to create a customizable chart builder that was navigable in its controls and seamlessly integrated new pathogens and locations.
We added in several new features to expand the chart capabilities for our more technical users. Some of the highlights included:
Flexible scrubbing to change the chart timeframe
Searchable locations and the ability to create customizable groups of locations
Toggling national trend levels or samples collected on the chart itself
Navigation by type of pathogen and pathogen itself
Changing the chart type to line chart, heat map, or variant compare when available
Saving editable charts to a grid for building reports
Exporting and sharing charts directly to social media
MAP VIEW
Visualizing the data geospatially to connect the dots for the general public
Given the geospatial nature of the data, we had our hearts set on determining how we could view wastewater site data and trends at the country, state, and even city level. We felt that a map could be the best entry point for the general public as it's a familiar and visually interesting data form.
In addition to mapping the locations of the wastewater sites, WastewaterSCAN provided a system through which they determine pathogen alert levels. We ultimately based the pathogen color-coding system off those alert levels. Since we didn't have data for every wastewater site in the country, we used solid fills to color in general regions and points/patterned fills for the specific wastewater sites depending on the zoom level.
MOBILE DESIGN
Optimizing a complicated data-driven dashboard for mobile experiences
Our super and primary users were mostly using the application on their laptop, so we used desktop as our design starting point. Eventually, we saw that roughly half the traffic to the website was mobile and sat down to optimize the UX for a better experience. We started by brainstorming our mobile use cases:
First time accessing the dashboard from a social media post or link sent by peer
Using the dashboard whenever you want to see pathogen levels on the go
Sending and sharing chart links for others to view like stakeholders or journalists
Sharing the dashboard with important stakeholders (hill, etc.)
Partner organizations loading their own wastewater treatment plant data
Scaling complicated interactive data visualizations always requires compromises in functionality. We collaborated with the client to prioritize our feature set for mobile use cases.
After multiple iterations, we landed on a visual design that emphasizes the map view in design and functionality. We included the chart view as a separate page, keeping the controls on their own pop-up modal to not overwhelm the user.
