VizCare: Using UCD Techniques to Impact the Child Welfare System

VizCare is a web-based visualization tool for making research-based evidence available to child welfare professionals. This paper reports on our use of user-centered design (UCD) research techniques to develop, build, and deploy the VizCare tool. This UCD approach included interacting with professionals from across the United States via a usability test and a deployment validation study. Our approach prioritized understanding and addressing the needs of these child welfare professionals who have an interest in using diverse forms of evidence to make informed decisions in child welfare policy and program development work. A key challenge in developing a useful tool in this domain is navigating what counts as valuable data-based evidence and how to communicate it meaningfully to professionals. Our tool integrates evidence from large, government datasets and qualitative, expressed concerns from people with lived experience. VizCare attempts to integrate these different forms of evidence with a previously developed tool called FosterCommViz in a single web-based system.