Launch HN: OurWorldInData (YC W19 Nonprofit) – Data on World’s Largest Problems

We take a lot of time to ensure that our work is as objective as possible. Our core activity is to present the data on a given topic clearly. Where possible we try to provide a summary of what the academic research says on this topic: why a given change might have happened, why it happened in a certain way, if we know anything about direct causations. However, causation is particularly difficult: especially when there are so many dimensions interacting (e.g. poverty impacts on fertility, child mortality, education, health outcomes, and their knock-on or cyclical impacts) and a range of interacting external factors (policy decisions, trade liberalisation etc.). Unless there is solid research to support an explanation of change, we don't include it, and stick what has changed rather than why.

Maintaining a very objective, somewhat central position is important for our work. We're happy that both people on the right and left use and trust our work: if we can at least first agree on the facts and data, then we are all in a better position to then discuss why given changes have happened. Media Bias Check (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/our-world-in-data/) puts us very slightly to the left, but we're very happy that 80% of the user responses rate us 'least biased' i.e. straight down the middle.

In terms of dismissing legitimate concerns about the current state: we think it's really important that acknowledging progress in many areas does not translate into an acceptance of the current state of the world. As we write here (https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better) although we have seen improvements in many ways, the state of the world is still unacceptable. And in some cases, things are sliding backwards (e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/homelessness-rise-england). We need to do much more. We hope that in providing a historical outlook on how things have changed provides insights and understanding of how we make the world a better place moving forward.

Perhaps because the navigation is overwhelming, you decided to duplicate your dropdown menu for most of the landing page.

I'm not sure why there is such an emphasis on your media coverage and authors at the top of the landing page. Usually that is a tactic to build social proof for customers feel comfortable buying from a new/unknown startup, but as far as I can tell you're not trying to make a sale.

It took me several clicks to get to an article with an interactive graph -- the cool part. More than just the data, you had good writing in catchy, accessible prose.

My suggestions would be

1) to highlight one cool / recent article+graph at the top of the landing page.

2) Simplify your topic organization; you have 16 different high-level topics, with further subtopics. That relegates you to an unwieldy dropdown. I realize you may be using the SDGs, but I'd prefer 5-6 MECE categories like Environment, Health, Economic Development... into which you can organize SDGs. If you had fewer categories you could fit navigation tabs or make use of UI techniques.

3) Overall, decide on what flow you want from the user and design around it. You have a newsletter, donation, even another web domain for SDG tracking. Who are your primary constituents, and what are you trying to help them accomplish? Is it to delight and educate laypersons, maximize small-dollar donations, highlight the academic rigor of the authors' analysis...?

As a reader, I would come back to the site often if it focused on showing me all the coolest data analysis. I might even browse there instead of Hacker News.

Right now, though, it seems closer in my mind to the World Bank's Open Data website, which has an overwhelming amount of great open data, which I would only visit if I were looking to access a raw dataset.

If lay readership is your primary goal, I would suggest looking for design inspiration from media publications like https://fivethirtyeight.com/ or https://www.newyorker.com/ . Even xkcd.com, which has dated design language, achieves the UX of putting the catchy content up front, and providing navigation for people who want more, rather than the other way around.

But of course, in-person testing can be tricky to scale so an online service is exactly what we're looking for. We'll check them out!

For the cancer section, I'm pretty sure you're showing net survival rates. You should mention this to avoid people from thinking they're actual survival rates.

In the last two charts on the cancer page, what does the circle size show? Total GDP? Patient count?