Reflections on the Use of Dashboards in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Dashboards have arguably been the most used visualizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. They were used to communicate its evolution to national governments for disaster mitigation, to the public domain to inform about its status, and to epidemiologists to comprehend and predict the evolution of the disease. Each design had to be tailored for different tasks and to varying audiences—in many cases set up in a very short time due to the urgent need. In this article, we collect notable examples of dashboards and reflect on their use and design during the pandemic from a user-oriented perspective. We interview a group of researchers with varying visualization expertise who actively used dashboards during the pandemic as part of their daily workflow. We discuss our findings and compile a list of lessons learned to support future visualization researchers and dashboard designers.