Design Feedback on Vision Zero Viewer MVP

Background

Vision Zero

Vision Zero is the city's strategy to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries, while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all. Through a combination of safer street design, targeted law enforcement, evidence-based public policy, thoughtful public engagement, and participation from our community, the City of Austin can ensure our streets are safe for everyone.

Vision Zero Viewer

The City of Austin Transportation Department has been developing a suite of open-source software tools to help our department and community understand where crashes are most likely to occur. Inspired by NYC's open-source Vision Zero Viewer project, our goal is to provide users with easy-to-understand visualizations of crashes occurring within Austin city limits.

Vision Zero Viewer is part of our Vision Zero Crash Data System, which also includes:

Users

The target audience for the Vision Zero Viewer is:

Austin residents
Transportation safety activists
Local and national journalists
Industry experts

Our goal is to provide the audience with tools to better understand the landscape of traffic fatalities and serious injuries in Austin. With the viewer, we hope to answer the following questions:
How many traffic fatalities and serious injuries are occurring in Austin? - Where are traffic fatalities and serious injuries occurring in Austin? - When are traffic fatalities and serious injuries most likely to occur?
What transportation modes are more likely to be involved in traffic fatalities and serious injuries?
Are traffic fatalities and serious injuries affecting a disproportionate number of people of a certain demographic?
What is the human impact of traffic fatalities and serious injuries?
Are we making progress in achieving our Vision Zero goals?

Design

Staging site: https://visionzero-staging.austinmobility.io/viewer/
XD doc for in-place comments

Our ask + caveats

So far, our work on Vision Zero Viewer has focused on basic dashboard functionality for core Vision Zero metrics. We've also used it as a tool to identify refinements to the overall Vision Zero Crash Data System scripts and data architecture.

We are in the process of adding a Design Researcher to our team in the near future and performing user research and usability testing for VZV will be among their first projects.

Further, we have not:

Optimized for mobile.
Undertaken accessibility compliance. (Though we are thrilled that both a vision-impaired resident and hearing-impaired resident — both of whom serve on the Pedestrian Advisory Council — have volunteered to test with us once our Design researcher is on board.)

Tl;dr there is still a lot of work to be done so we're not looking to invest heavily in changes right now. That said, we know there is some low-hanging fruit as is and would also love advice/resources for future work.

Questions

Color recommendations would be especially helpful at this point in time:
- Recommendations on distinct colors for visualizations with 5+ categories, e.g. the Race and Ethnicity tab of the Demographics chart?
- Can you reccomend any existing high-accessiblity and/or legibility color palettes that we should look at adopting?
Where should we outline our methodology and disclaimers on how we collected and refined crash data?
Should we make the "Fatalities/Serious Injuries" controls in the summary page global rather than per component?
How can we improve the text content?

Migrated from atd-vz-data #694

cityofaustin / atd-data-tech