Designing data-rich visualization experiences for exploring livability across American communities.
The AARP Livability Index is a public data platform that helps people explore and compare community livability a variety of indicators. As Lead UX Designer, I helped shape the platform’s visualization strategies, and information architecture to make complex datasets more accessible and actionable.
Role
Lead User Experience Designer
Timeline
2020-2021
IN HOUSE
Focus
Color Of Change
Data Visualization / Information Architecture / Interaction Design / Accessibility / Public Data Systems
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.
Making Large Datasets Understandable
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.
Researching Diverse Audiences
To better understand how people interpreted and interacted with the platform, I led:
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usability testing,
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audience interviews,
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collaborative workshops, and
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comparative product analysis.
Research focused on how users searched for locations, interpreted livability scores, compared communities, and navigated large amounts of information across desktop and mobile experiences.
Testing revealed that users often struggled to understand how scores were calculated, locate key comparison tools, and interpret visualization patterns. These insights directly informed changes to navigation, visualization hierarchy, explanatory content, and interaction flows.
Impact
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.
Restructuring the Experience
The existing experience buried important tools and overwhelmed users with dense content structures and fragmented navigation patterns. To improve usability and discoverability, I streamlined the information architecture, consolidated repetitive content, and centralized the platform’s primary data exploration tools into a more cohesive experience.
This included redesigning comparison workflows, simplifying navigation systems, clarifying data source transparency, and creating clearer pathways between maps, scores, visualizations, and educational resources.
Designing Accessible Data Visualization Patterns
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.
