​First, here's my smoothed graph using the last couple weeks' data:

​Why? Because IHME and Google are not giving us a clear view of the data yet, today.
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IHME hasn't updated their data since Dec. 23. They are only showing what they thought the data will be at this time.
And Google's data is too jagged to make sense of:

So I have smoothed the data from the last 2 weeks or so to give an idea of where we are at this time in the pandemic.

 It averages the last 7 daays including today, to give us a view of how Covid is affecting people in California.

As you can see, it's trending up, with the latest value estimating on average about 517 deaths per day on January 12, 2021 in California. 

I used "Moving Averages" for this project because I theorized that even if the reporting is actually on time each day, and if people really do tend to die in large numbers on certain days (as opposed to some numbers coming in for Monday that should have been assigned to Sunday)--even in either scenario--taking the local average (of the last 7 days of data) gives us insight into if the death toll is going up, and by about how much on average. How quickly is this disease rampaging? 

As it stands, the averaged numbers of deaths are going up at this moment, and are over 4 times California's previous highest days in August. 

​Update on 1/18: 

On reflection, taking a week by week average (one data point for each week) is going to be a better indication of where we are, as there are always strong outlier days. The weekly average for 1/10 to 1/16 (7 days) is 527​.

Update on 1/23:

Google has updated their graphs to the same 7-day moving average as my graph above. An example:

When you're surveying people, you're often trying to make your product the most personalized and relevant for your users. However, whether in a group or even one-on-one, often they don't feel comfortable telling you more personal or emotional things. You want to know what their biggest weakness is, so that you can provide a solution. You want to know the things they long for that they aren't broadcasting in their high-powered corporate lives. So this is a technique I use to get people to open up.
1. First tell them, "I'm going to be giving you a notecard to write something personal, and when you are ready, place it in this box. Your answer will not be shared with this group." Indicate the group of fellow survey participants in the room (not the market research team). 
2. Ask them to take a moment, close their eyes and focus on their center. Ask them to take a deep breath.
3. Now tell them: "Please dive deep and into your center and ask yourself this question: What is your biggest weakness? When you are ready, write it down and place it in this box." Or ask whatever you wish to know: it could be asking them what they most struggled with in the last week, it could be about something they have really wanted lately.
4. Then add, "Please don't forget to write your participant number on it." The participant number would be a number assigned to each person, which should also be printed on their name tag. This allows for an additional amount of anonymity during group time that helps people share more. Afterwards, you would label the notecard with their real name for your internal records, as you would have obtained their consent to take notes on them individually.
5. Use the information on the individuals and the group to create your product.

Do you have a complex program that requires many tools to be intuitively arranged and easy to find? One method to find out how your users will look for these tools is to do the card sort.
Card Sort:

• Have many individual users come in to your office for a study
• Have the tools written down on white cards
• Have categories written down on colored cards
• Provide extra colored and white cards for users to come up with their own names for tools and categories
• Have users sort the cards in isolated room in front of a neutral mediator so they aren’t influenced by other users
  

When running user experience tests, you can find our what’s hard to use or unclear about your design. Clarity is king.
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Despite popular opinion, substituting images for text can often alienate potential customers who can’t figure out what you mean quickly enough. So instead of this:

You could use something like Microsoft Office does, a combination of pictures and text:

Alternately, for the tail of users that desire only visual icons, you can also study how quickly new users pick up on your symbolic images and how motivated they are to do so.
Today’s software complexity is growing, and with that comes a great need to manage interactions in a clear and engaging way.