Powering biologists’s minds to make discoveries.

Web applications can finally handle genome-scale biological data. Even your iPhone does on-the-fly machine learning.

Point and click analysis for transcriptomics/differential expression.

Dropbox has drag-and-drop interaction. Suddenly, it makes sense for science too.

The modern era, but biology is still catching up.

The standard for search suggestion & results

People still used Internet Explorer—for real.

Barely one year into Obama’s first term. People were listening to Rihanna sing about finding love in a hopeless place. The iPhone 3GS was the hottest thing.

Web 2.0 is still pretty new, but animation, interactivity, and more data are coming to even the previously static Google Search UI.

Google Chrome hadn’t yet come out, Web 2.0 was still a thing. Android was brand new.

Google plays a huge role in public emergencies, like pandemics. We worked with HHS to provide public health guidance and to direct people to resources like flu vaccine clinics

As if the financial crisis wasn’t enough, here was a potentially serious pandemic.

The era of ”Big Data,” and just getting a handle on how to structure it.

Empowering people to find what works, faster

People were listening on their iPhone 6 to Hotline Bling.

Portable tech was coming of age—it was the year of the Apple Watch.

Folks might have been dancing to Happy by Pharrell Williams.

A new standard for open public health data

Governments were just starting to adopt modern technologies, and yes, we still had to support Internet Explorer.

The authoritative source on Mac user interface design.

Apple just released the iPod. Google just got out of beta. If you had a cell phone at all, it was a flip phone.

A lot of software still came in boxes—on a CD.

## Can we **predict & prevent** disease outbreaks?

## **Disease outbreaks are a major global threat.**<br />Can technology provide an early warning, and facilitate speedier intervention?

![Alt](/content/projects/google-flu-trends/p_fluTrendsWorld.png)

Google.org’s Predict & Prevent team was focused on global threats from social and climate/ecological changes, initially disease outbreaks. I joined after several engineers took on the challenge of using aggregated search patterns to estimate the level of influenza in the population. Their efforts resulted in a novel technology that produces good estimates of official flu activity indicators in dozens of countries—and later, dengue activity.

![Alt](/content/projects/google-flu-trends/p_howFluTrendsWorks.gif)

Google Flu Trends has been cited, reported on, and analyzed tens of thousands of times by researchers, public health officials, media, computer scientists, and designers around the world. It was the first major demonstration of how anonymous aggregated patterns of routine online behavior could be used for a public health purpose like this.

Unfortunately, a lesson of the Covid-19 pandemic is that early warning isn’t enough. Society needs to be willing to respond.

![Alt](/content/projects/google-flu-trends/p_fluTrendsUS.png)

Since flu is seasonal, what’s notable is how different the flu season is this year compared to previous years. The best view on that is to stack or layer the seasons—in this case, they recede into the past with lighter, thinner lines, like faded memories.

![Alt](/content/projects/google-flu-trends/p_widget.png)

As usual, the design challenge was to do it in the Google way: Make something reasonably universal, in a language highly constrained by the Google voice.

Our website (looking dated here) was intended to serve as an adjunct for public health agencies (they often cited it), and to engage ordinary citizens in awareness of flu activity. Part of an effective public health response—as we’ve seen, or not seen, in 2020 and beyond—is a ready, educated public.

![Alt](/content/projects/google-flu-trends/p_dengueTrendsBrazil.png)

Can we predict & prevent disease outbreaks?

Flu Trends

Product designer