Unlocking potential: Analyzing the content, style, structure, and interactivity of Mesonets as operational dashboards.

Emergency managers need data and information to make life-saving decisions on behalf of the public. Operational dashboards, if designed appropriately, can provide this information in a central location and reduce cognitive demands during decision-making. Mesonet websites can serve as a type of operational dashboard that has the potential to provide the meteorological data necessary for emergency managers to make decisions. In this study, we use quantitative content analysis to examine the content, style, structure, and interactivity of 18 Mesonet websites from across the contiguous U.S. We find that Mesonet websites vary in the type and amount of content they include. For website style, we find that Mesonet websites primarily present their content with maps and data filters. We find that the structure of the website content was consistent across websites. Finally, we find that most Mesonet websites lacked interactivity, or visual feedback, which inhibits ease of use. We discuss extensions for future work.