Making this information accessible is amazing work, thank you!
But, alas, it loses a lot in the UX department:
1) It's low-contrast. This makes it hard to read for a lot of people, unnecessarily so.
2) It uses a font that is hard to read. Not sure if it's font rendering, or if the font is just bad, but... just a plain Sans Serif would be fine?
3) The gradient for the map is pretty much not fulfilling any function, because you can't read it with any kind of precision. You'd be better off with 4 distinct gradients. Or better, separate colors.
4) If I can nitpick: The title has 3 different font faces, with misaligned baselines. Please don't do that :)
I wonder if the thinking was to make it deliberately uninviting and difficult like the Bloomberg terminal to make people feel cooler while using it (which is a legitimate thing - i'm not saying that glibly at all. People that master the bloomberg terminal feel like wizards which certainly contributes to lockin, and that sort of needlessly difficult UX is somehow associated with being "cool" or being like a "real command center" somehow)
While I agree with the GP, I don't agree with the jab at Bloomberg terminal. There is nothing needless in Bloomberg terminal - it comes with a special keyboard and everything is keyboard driven. There are no animations such as the ones you see in macOS and Windows that take up 300ms. There are no distracting popups and notifications. It is probably the most incredible feat of UI/UX design...ever, perhaps airplane cockpits and nuclear power plant control rooms would rival.
Just because UI is dense does not mean it is not easy to learn. Dense UI provides more information than something with 5 levels of hierarchical layouts, each screen animating with 300ms of bullshit animations. Furthermore, learning curve should be acceptable for people that truly want to use a tool on a daily basis (for e.g. emacs or vim).
There is a reason why people who use Bloomberg terminal will never want anything else. Here is a video of the thought process that goes into designing just the keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_juj1MIRJVE
Have you used Bloomberg terminal or talked to a user? Regarding lock-in: I think its the opposite - when the users don't want to switch to anything else, that's the best a company can do. That's the kind of "lock-in" every company should aspire to.
I've used a Bloomberg terminal and most of my social circle has as well. I guess maybe difficult isn't the right word to describe it,
but definitely uninviting on purpose. And a lot of my friends get a kick out of how uninviting it looks and how much they feel like a wizard using it. Theres definitely an aspect to the way it looks unrefined that make people love it, and I guess a better way of saying it might be that trying to emulate that by making something actually inaccessible and unrefined is not going to be successful
I think you're attributing ugliness "on purpose" incorrectly. No one at Bloomberg exclaims "Oh gee, let's make this more ugly, people will get a kick out of it."
It's just that they haven't bloated this app with CSS styles and other unnecessary aesthetics. It works. That's all.
Very genuinely curious, do most people consider these "UX" instead of "UI"?
For me, I'd like to be able to click or at least copy/paste the titles of the studies shown on the map, e.g. when I hover over houston, I can visually read the title of the study, but I can't move my mouse to click or highlight the text, or else the box disappears.
I'm very glad someone is making a dashboard that actually brings "new" information that's presented differently than other people have presented it. Lots of fairly derivative coronavirus dashboards have popped up on ShowHN over the past month or so, but this is the first along these lines.
I know people that have this condition and have been told there's none available at pharmacies when in fact it's in stock (based on how they resolved their problem).
He doesn’t believe in evolution, nor climate change. At the end of January, he called warnings of a pandemic „crazy“. He has published 3000 papers in the last ten years. And even the photo of him is quite funny if you followed the news in 2016.
Judging by the list of trials, an awful lot of resources is spent on this. I wonder what the opportunity costs are.
There's a ridiculous controversy in France about this guy. Lots of French people see him as the misunderstood genius that could save us from the virus, if it weren't for our evil government (obviously sold to the pharmaceutical companies). We even have celebrities (actors, rappers, humorists...) begging the president to listen to this doctor. We reached the point where we trust "celebrities" more than the scientists leading the effort to fight the pandemics.
I watched the Greek daily COVID-19 update, and the epidemiologist in charge was asked about chloroquine specifically. He said that we are administering it to patients, along with 1-2 other drugs (if they want it), but the results haven't been conclusive yet.
We "only" have 2-5 deaths a day, so it's not a huge sample size, but if the drug were extremely effective, you wouldn't need a very large sample size to see a difference.
> We "only" have 2-5 deaths a day, so it's not a huge sample size, but if the drug were extremely effective, you wouldn't need a very large sample size to see a difference.
I'm not so sure about that. If the goal is to get from 97% case survival rates to 99+%, the results may not be all that obvious from small sample sizes.
Minor bugbear: the thin font used does not lend itself to rendering nicely in Firefox 74 running on a GNOME 3.36 linux install with subpixel font antialiasing:
https://i.imgur.com/LauxkrQ.jpg
I made it more readable it for myself by switching to grayscale antialiasing, but it's still not a very readable font as it's quite small and thin and is light-ish blue against dark-ish blue background - standard sans serif, slightly larger and with more contrast in colours probably better for accessibility
Hey, this looks really good! Didn't even know that the information about those studies was accesible. I don't understand the phases meaning, can you explain them? Maybe a table or tooltip somewhere could help.
As per www.worldometers.info, Russia seem to have relatively low death rate (0.06 per million of population), despite having a border with China, no early distancing measures, public transportation in the cities, etc. Could be just accident, but they did one interesting thing - recommended a nation-wide treatment strategy early on.
The confirmed cases number is effectively useless without models for extrapolating into an estimated infection count. Presumptive cases aren't bothering to be tested, asymptomatic cases rarely tested, lack or abundance of supplies differ by country and region, etc... We have very little idea of the prevalence in any given country - confirmed case count is just a floor.
Russia shut its border with China super early, which helped. However, it better be careful now now that its population is unprepared mentally for a potential outbreak seeded by European travelers weeks ago.
But, alas, it loses a lot in the UX department:
1) It's low-contrast. This makes it hard to read for a lot of people, unnecessarily so.
2) It uses a font that is hard to read. Not sure if it's font rendering, or if the font is just bad, but... just a plain Sans Serif would be fine?
3) The gradient for the map is pretty much not fulfilling any function, because you can't read it with any kind of precision. You'd be better off with 4 distinct gradients. Or better, separate colors.
4) If I can nitpick: The title has 3 different font faces, with misaligned baselines. Please don't do that :)