Gender Data Compass
Problem: Open Data Watch (ODW) needed a means to share data and insights from the Gender Data Compass, which monitors the availability and openness of sex-disaggregated data and data specific to women and explores qualitative factors of the environment in which the national statistical system operates in over 180 countries.
Solution: I designed and managed the development of a user friendly online platform that offered direction and support to national statisticians, international donors, and civil society advocates on their path to achieving gender equality.
Role: Design Manager.
Time: June to October 2023.
Funder: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Research
Understanding User Needs
I drew on ODW’s experience working with users of the Open Data Inventory (ODIN), a similar platform that monitors the coverage and openness of official statistics overall, to create a rough mental model of user groups.
National Statisticians
Overview: These users work within national statistical offices in countries around the world and are responsible for collecting, analyzing, and publishing data on national statistical office websites.
Research: The ODIN team has engaged with these users through workshops, webinars, and email as they seek to understand how their scores were calculated and can be improved.
Insights: These users require an in-depth understanding of their country’s assessment so that they can close gaps and improve access to their data. They will also want to compare how they are doing within their region and globally out of a healthy sense of competition.
International Donors
Overview: These users work within aid agencies, international development organizations, and foundations, allocating limited resources to improve data that informs and monitors efforts to achieve gender equality.
Research: Conversations with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation representatives provided insights into their priorities. And our research has shown the limited availability of funds and donors.
Insights: These users need to understand the problems facing specific countries as well as international trends so that they can identify needs and opportunities.
Civil Society Advocates
Overview: These include a range of additional users working within countries and at the international level that seek to improve data for gender equality.
Research: Other research and advocacy organizations have cited ODIN scores and even use them to help calculate other transparency indexes. Journalists have published articles within countries on ODIN scores.
Insights: These users need access to scores for each country and metadata to help them conduct in-depth analysis. An in-depth understanding of gaps inform data-driven calls for improvement.
A Competitive Analysis
To understand how the Compass would fit within the landscape of development data indexes, I drew on a stocktaking exercise I had worked on that covered other development data platforms.
This research showed the potential for the Gender Data Compass to provide value with its focus on gender statistics. None of the platforms had a primary focus on gender-relevant statistics, and only four had at least one indicator that covered gender data (the Open Data Inventory, the OURData Index, Statistical Performance Indicators, and the Use of Statistics Index).
And the research process had allowed me to take note of the usability challenges of each platform, although this was ultimately beyond the scope of the exercise and not included in the final report.
Reviewing Gender Data Platforms
To build on my previous research, I analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of two gender data platforms.
The SDG Gender Index by EM2030 measures where the world stands on the vision of gender equality embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals. It includes rankings, country profiles, a report, and access to data download.
Strengths
Strong visual design of banners. Users first see a banner showing a woman behind a torn page, which is a motif that repeats across their pages and reports.
Bold colors.
Catchy tagline that is timely in reference to the pandemic.
Access to the report is emphasized in multiple locations.
The report is elaborately designed with a great deal of emphasis on color and photographs within data visualizations.
Weaknesses
Only a few country profiles are produced, and although they provide great context, they are quite text heavy.
The dataset download is a single button that only downloads a spreadsheet.
The full report is only available in PDF and only limited content is available in HTML, reducing accessibility.
The Gender Data Portal of the World Bank provides access to sex-disaggregated data and gender statistics. Users can search by indicator or access country and topic dashboards. The portal includes data visualization and analysis, a survey catalogue, and bulk download. It also links to gender statistics publications, guidelines, and other resources from the World Bank and partner agencies.
Strengths
Striking visual design using abstract art for a clean, analytical impression throughout the various pages.
Provides quick access to indicators and with some reports and analysis at the bottom.
Country Profiles share access to the data and provide brief analysis and engaging visualizations of featured indicators. No extensive text.
Data visualizations allow for user selection and download of the data.
Weaknesses
The lack of photos creates a disconnect between the data and what the data are about. Only the data stories use photographs.
Some of the data visualizations, particularly the one on availability by indicator under the data availability section try to convey so much information at once that they are difficult to read and interpret. The simpler visualizations are easier to work with.
Strategies for the design based on the analysis of other platforms:
Include more photographs on the home page and report to distinguish visually from ODIN and keep the research connected to the communities that will be supported through improved gender equality.
Develop catchy taglines for memorable messaging.
Use more vibrant colors in favor of a greater focus on advocacy (while still harmonizing the palette with ODIN and ODW branding).
Provide more context and explanation as to what the Compass is and covers rather than diving straight into the quantitative findings.
Include simple data visualizations of each component of the scores.
Provide an intuitive user-selected download access of the data. More than just a button, but without so many options that it overwhelms the user.
Planning
I developed an Information Architecture (AI) that would allow users to quickly locate and understand relevant gender data insights.
Defining Core Content Categories
Dataset Information: Users will need access to the details of the assessments that informed the calculation of the quantitative and qualitative scores.
Global Trends: An analysis of trends across countries and regions must be available for international-focused users.
Advocacy: Content must emphasize importance of data for gender equality and why each of the score components matter.
Rankings: The platform must present rankings to compare countries based on an average of their availability and openness scores.
Country Scores: The platform will present the quantitative scores for data availability and openness and qualitative categorical scores for statistical foundations, capacity, and financing.
Site Map of Core Content
An Intuitive Navigation Flow
With many user groups and functionalities, multiple paths could be mapped across the site, but below is the core navigation flow of a national statistician.
Senior Statistician Gloria wants to identify gaps in official statistics affecting her country’s score.
Mid-fidelity Wireframes:
As the web team that created the ODIN platform and database would be repurposing much of that architecture for the Compass, I created mock-ups to reflect designs that reflected the most significant departures from ODIN.
Design
I created everything from the branding to detailed mock-ups that the web team used to develop and implement the live online version of the platform.
Brand identity
In addition to proposing the name of “Gender Data Compass” to fit within the realm of other indexes and tools, I also developed a logo and color palette that would harmonize with established branding for Open Data Watch and Open Data Inventory.
I designed a range of options for a logo that reflected a compass providing self-driven guidance.
Based on feedback from colleagues and management at Open Data Watch, we settled on the final design below.
Mock-ups
I created mock-ups using placeholder content so that the web team could create the website while the research team continued their work.
Informing research through design
To mitigate delays in the research, I proposed options to score and structure qualitative data that helped shape how the research team finalized their work.
Based on the preliminary data that the research team sent me, I developed a spreadsheet using mock data to establish a scoring methodology for the three qualitative categories for three imaginary countries that the research team used to build their data input system and visualizations.
Publication
The Gender Data Compass was successfully tested, published, and disseminated within a matter of days due to research delays and a hard deadline.
Testing
I worked with the web team to address as many issues as possible in parallel with the research process, but only a few days remained once the live data and website text were finalized.
Managing the process:
I created detailed lists of issues with screenshots in a Google Doc to communicate priorities to the web team as this was their preferred method of communication.
As the web team was based in Greece, each morning, I reviewed the website and flagged any issues that still remained and added any new problems that had appeared.
Given the limited number of rounds of adjustments that the time difference made possible, I prioritized only the most significant problems and kept a list of less urgent issues to fix as a follow-up to the launch.
Results:
We prioritized issues where data weren’t downloading correctly, data visualization design, and glitches such as drop-down menus sticking or the table of contents disappearing if clicked more than once. We were also able to address spacing issues in the design of the website and implement text edits at the request of the research and communication team.
Following the publication of the site, we were able to address further issues related to spacing and consistency of text and design elements throughout the site.
Live Narrative Walkthrough
To demonstrate the value of the platform to our donors and partners, we prepared a narrative walkthrough as part of a live demonstration of the website. I developed a script and presented an enthusiastic narration describing how different users would access the information on the platform.
Below is a segment from this narrative walkthrough script covering the experience of a national statistician accessing their country profile. This was based on feedback we received from real users.
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Each country that we assess has a country profile. It provides an in-depth look at how a given country is doing across each of the points of the Gender Data Compass.
[ON SCREEN: Select Ghana from the list of countries.]
“We’re going to follow a country statistician from Ghana like Gloria. As a member of the Gender Data Network, Gloriawould be among the first to hear about the GDC, and she would be eager to see how they are doing so that she could share this with her boss, Sam – the Chief Statistician of Ghana’s NSO.”
Here at the top, we start off with a brief overview of their combined availability and openness scores, and then the global and regional rank that this combined score results in.
These ranks are always of great interest to countries. They like to compare how they’re doing with some of their neighbors. And the desire to improve their rank helps motivate some countries to make improvements.
Our statistician is a little disappointed to see that Ghana isn’t more towards the top of the rankings. It doesn’t bode well – nor does that score of 30.
[ON SCREEN: Scroll down to visualization.]
On this SUMMARY tab down here, countries can see summary scores for each of the five points of the gender data compass.
Our statistician can see that despite how well Ghana is doing with its institutional foundations and capacity levels, data openness is an area that still requires attention.
[ON SCREEN: Scroll to the recommendations.]
And scrolling a bit further down, we see a set of recommendations. The statistician can review these to get an initial idea of where improvements are most needed based on our research.
So, for Ghana, in addition to encouraging them to publish more gender data to close some specific gaps, we also highlight some of the easiest ways that they could improve the openness of their data – by publishing in more open formats, all under an open license. This will allow anyone to freely download and use their data.
But every tab of this country profile sheds light on many other ways that a country could improve.
[ON SCREEN: Scroll back up to the tabs and click Availability.]
Scrolling back up, the statistician can transition to the AVAILABILITY tab. In our recommendations, we encouraged Ghana to make more data available, and here they can see what categories have the least data available.
[ON SCREEN: Scroll to the first bar chart.]
Environment and digital connectivity are the areas where they most need to improve. This points the statistician in a general direction, and scrolling down, they can start to pinpoint the availability gaps more precisely.
[ON SCREEN: Scroll to the second bar chart.]
This visualization shows a breakdown of Ghana’s availability score across each of the four elements we assessed for this.
But the statistician wants to know more about the specific categories they need the most improvement in so that they can develop a set of priorities that they can recommend to their boss.
[ON SCREEN: Select environment from the drop-down menu.]
They can select any of the categories from this menu, and it shows how the data perform across each element.
The list of indicators shows exactly what datasets we’re talking about in terms of gender-relevant environment indicators.
And from the bar chart, the statistician can see that very few of these have sex-disaggregated data, and none at all provide any further disaggregation, nothing substantial in the last ten years, and nothing broken down by the different regions of Ghana.
Closing gaps in data availability will be absolutely crucial to not only improving Ghana’s country scores, but also to making vital information available to policymakers and citizens alike.