Health, United States
A congressionally mandated health report has been published every year since 1974. It had never existed anywhere but a PDF.
Website Architecture
Page Design
Data Finder Revision
Navigation & Taxonomy Development
508 Accessibility Compliance
WHAT I DID
The Challenge
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Health, United States is NCHS's flagship publication—a comprehensive annual report on the health of the nation, mandated by Congress and published continuously since 1974. For decades, it existed only as a dense PDF, sometimes running hundreds of pages. Researchers could download it, but finding specific data meant scrolling through tables or knowing exactly which page to search.
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NCHS wanted to change that. The goal was a digital-first platform that would make the publication's data more accessible, more searchable, and more timely. But this wasn't a simple PDF-to-web conversion. The content spans birth rates to death statistics, chronic conditions to healthcare expenditures — decades of trend data across dozens of population subgroups.
The Approach
I joined the project through my role as a contractor with Windsor Group, supporting NCHS at CDC. I started as second to the lead Webmaster, working alongside another colleague. When the Webmaster left mid-project, I became lead.
The team was cross-functional: Statisticians and Epidemiologists provided the data and wrote the initial content. Health Communications experts shaped the messaging. Editors ensured everything met plain language standards. A graphic design team created the visual assets (e.g. topic images; static graphs, charts, and trendlines) which we oversaw for consistency and accessibility. Our job was to design a system that could hold all of it and still be usable.
The first challenge was taxonomy. We needed a search architecture that could filter data by edition, subject, population subgroup, and overarching topic, and we had to do it in a way that felt intuitive rather than bureaucratic. Getting that structure right was foundational; everything else depended on it.
Page design came next. We created templates for topic pages that could present key findings, trend analyses, and supporting data in a consistent format. The homepage needed to surface the breadth of content without overwhelming users; we landed on visual topic tiles that invite exploration.
508 compliance was non-negotiable. Every chart, table, and interactive element had to be fully accessible. Dense statistical data is hard enough to parse visually; making it work for screen readers required careful attention throughout.
The Data Finder was where search and structure came together. The Webmaster built the initial version; I revised it, expanding the topics and subjects covered, as well as making NCHS Data Sets searchable alongside the traditional PDF and Excel trend tables. Those data sets have since replaced the traditional ones entirely.
The core build took about six months in 2022, with the platform launching and receiving rolling updates beginning in early 2023.
The Work
Complete information structure for a multi-decade health statistics publication, with taxonomy supporting search by edition, subject, population subgroup, and topic.
Architecture
Full Section 508 accessibility across all pages, tables, and interactive elements.
Compliance
Homepage, topic page templates, Data Finder interface, Sources and Definitions sections.
Design
The Impact
Health, United States now exists as a living digital platform rather than an annual PDF drop. Users can explore topics visually, filter data by population subgroup, and download specific tables rather than entire reports. The Data Finder has become the primary tool for accessing NCHS trend data, and the architecture we built continues to support new editions without redesign.
