iHeard St. Louis Design Research
Human-centered design research investigating how design choices influence users’ engagement with public health information online.
Role
Lead Author
Student Designer
Collaborators
Penina Laker
Alexis Marsh
Rachel Garg
Christine Watridge
Alex Koehl
Tools
FigJam
Figma
Box
Timeline
November 2023 -
May 2024
iHeard STL is the nation’s first local health information tracking system. Born out of the COVID-19 pandemic, iHeard aims to share accurate, timely health information to build health knowledge and trust in science within the St. Louis region (now in four regions across the United States). Every week, 200 St. Louis adults share what health information they have heard in the last week. The iHeard team uses that data to track the spread of health information, shares those findings to the public dashboard, and shares alerts and visual resources with local Community Connectors and on social media. iHeard is a collaborative project between a team of designers and public health practitioners at WashU that uses the power of design to share relevant health information within our community.
I joined the iHeard team in October 2022 as a Student Designer. As both a design and math student, I was given the opportunity to participate in visual resource design and data evaluation for the project. At the early stages of my involvement in the project, I would receive a creative brief based on that weeks health information findings. Using the iHeard design system, I designed visual resources for iHeard STL’s social media. These resources were also shared with Community Connectors to get pressing health information to the St. Louis community in a timely manner. Some of the resources that I made were included in iHeard’s recognition as a Graphic Design USA Health and Wellness Award Winner in 2023.
Three visual resources I designed for iHeard’s social media and Community Connectors, specifically on the topics of Narcan access, blood donation, and long COVID.
During the spring 2023 semester, there was an opportunity to share some of the research that I had been doing with iHeard had been doing at WashU’s undergraduate research symposium. At the time, I was interested in how design decisions impacted the user’s engagement with health information on social media. The core research question was: How do design decisions impact engagement with health information on social media? At the time, we had no statistically significant findings but presented the progress of the project at the WashU Undergraduate Research Symposium as the only presenter from the School of Art. I designed the poster using the iHeard design system and wrote the abstract. The next steps for the project were to allow for more time and more visual resources to collect data on. With a larger dataset, we could then begin to draw significant conclusions.
Presenting my poster at WashU’s Undergraduate Research Symposium in Spring 2023.
During the fall 2023 semester, with 4 more months of engagement data, I worked with Prof. Rachel Garg, who leads the iHeard Evaluation team, to look deeper into how design decisions impacted user engagement with health information online. We defined engagement as likes and comments, so we were looking for correlations between the number of likes and comments on iHeard’s social media and various design attributes. Part of the data collection process that I had been involved with since October 2022 was recording the engagement with each of iHeard’s posts as well as the design attributes that the visual resource included. As a member of the evaluation team, I helped to define which design attributes we tracked. Design research is about asking the right questions (in this case, defining the right attributes to track). The iterative nature of the project allowed us to add more design attributes as the project evolved.
An example resource with the design attributes pointed out.
We found statistically significant differences in engagement for assets that included design attributes such as illustrations of people, humor, and local callouts. These insights directly inform the decisions of the visual design team, resulting in an ever evolving iHeard design system. Data-driven visual design decisions empower iHeard to better deliver on its mission.
Resources that included illustrations or pictures of people, featured humor, or had a local callout had significantly higher engagement and resources with data as their central focus had significantly lower engagement.
Resources with examples of design attributes that increase and decrease engagement with the average engagement data.
In addition to another team members work to ensure that iHeard’s design system was 508-compliant, these findings informed how to adapt the design system to better serve the St. Louis community. This led to a system that included more people, more local callouts, and less data. These changes reflect iHeard’s commitment to our core users - the St. Louis community - and how design research can make products work better for the people they aim to serve.
@iheardstl’s Instagram feed 9 months apart showcasing the fast adapting design system.
Throughout the spring 2024 semester, I was the lead author for a research abstract that documented these findings. Under the mentorship and guidance of the iHeard team, I crafted an abstract that shared these findings and made the case for interdisciplinary collaboration to create adaptable and effective health communication products.
The abstract was accepted by a panel of peer reviewers for UCDA’s Design Educators Conference in Mesa, Arizona where I presented these findings to design faculty from Universities across the country.
iHeard team at UCDA’s Design Educators conference.
Flash-talk presentation at WashU’s Undergraduate Research Symposium 2024.
You can read the full text of the abstract here and explore the poster below.
(1) Using research to center the user. While this project focused on more traditional graphic design resources, I thought of the research process as a UX research project. We were able to see how users interacted with different types of visual resources, make hypotheses, collect and analyze data, and adapt based on findings. At the core of iHeard is it’s service to the user so every part of the project must begin with them in mind.
(2) Asking the right questions. In order to figure out what design attributes work best with our users, we first had to ask the right questions. Which attributes would we track? How would we define engagement? Without asking the right questions, we could not use the findings to cater the experience to our users.
(3) Interdisciplinary work leads to unique outcomes. I could not have done any of this work without the entire iHeard team, both public health practitioners and designers. The collaboration between these two teams is how iHeard is able to reach as wide of an audience as possible. iHeard St. Louis exemplifies how designers and researchers collaborate on an iterative, data-informed design process to create adaptable and effective health communication products.
Key Learnings
Case Study
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