AARP
SERVICES
DATA VISUALIZATION
ACCESSIBILITY
DATA PIPELINES
YEAR
2022
INFO
The AARP Livability Index helps people evaluate how well communities support quality of life through data related to housing, transportation, environment, health, and opportunity. The platform serves a wide range of audiences — including consumers, policymakers, researchers, advocates, and media organizations — each with different levels of technical literacy, accessibility needs, and decision-making goals.
PROBLEM
One of the project’s core challenges was translating complex, multidimensional datasets into experiences that felt approachable, understandable, and useful for a broad public audience. Users needed to compare communities, interpret scoring systems, navigate maps, and understand how livability metrics were calculated — often without prior familiarity with data visualization tools. The redesign focused on simplifying information hierarchy, improving visual pacing, reducing cognitive overload, and helping users move fluidly between high-level summaries and deeper contextual insights.
SOLUTION
The redesign introduced a more flexible and accessible visualization system that supported maps, comparison tools, scoring breakdowns, and category-level exploration across multiple device sizes. A major priority was ensuring visualizations remained understandable for users with varying levels of data literacy, technical comfort, and accessibility needs. The interaction system emphasized readability, responsive behavior, visual hierarchy, and progressive disclosure to help users engage with complex datasets without feeling overwhelmed. The redesigned platform improved engagement, usability, and discoverability across the Livability Index experience. Ongoing usability testing and iterative refinement continued to strengthen how users explored community data, compared locations, and understood the factors influencing livability across the United States.
