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Poverty Over – A Case Study, Part 4 – Delivering

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on March 28, 2011. Filed under production, project management, work. Tagged , , , , , , . 46 Comments.
In the final phase of this Poverty Over Infographic Case Study, not only were we delivering the actual flash interactive infographic, but we were finishing off the rest of the website build as well. I’ve not mentioned it up until now but all this work was going on simultaneously to the infographic.
The website involved creating templated pages for 8 factors that often surround countries in poverty. Each page has a case study and eventually will have content created by The Guardian newspaper. We created a simple templated system that allows Christian Aid to update this content in their own time – without an expensive CMS behind it.

As well as the website build we created the 8 specific animations for each factor that usually surrounds poverty.
An example of which is here:
In reality the website and animation delivery went very smoothly – credit to our designer, developer and animator!
So, we had delivered the site in its final connected up state. The infographic was in place and most content was now sitting on the website. Naturally this was the first time that the client had seen everything in context of each other. We entered a period of tweaks, minor functionality and design improvements.
In the background we were rigorously functionality testing, system and browser testing. It is important though that at this stage of the project we look all the way back to the original goals of the communication and ask ourselves whether we’ve achieved what we set out to do?

It was our job to display and highlight the following key parts of the story:

1. The world has, on the most part, moved out of poverty especially over the last 60 years.
2. There are however vast parts of Africa and Asia that still have a a way to go.
3. Countries that have been extremely poor before have come out of poverty.
4. With further investment, development and aid – it is possible to move the countries remaining in poverty into prosperity.

So have we achieved what we set out to do? Well, early indications are that sharing of the site through Twitter and Facebook is going through the roof – which is nice to hear. However, in the spirit of continuous improvement – let us know what you think. Does it work? What could we have done better? We’ll take your comments on board and hopefully bear them in mind on our next interactive infographic!

Poverty Over – A Case Study, Part 3 – Building

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on March 22, 2011. Filed under Blog, production, project management, Review, work. Tagged , , , , , , , . 37 Comments.

In my previous post I talked about entering the build stage of our project without a complete plan over what the final infographic was going to look like or how it was going to behave. That might sound foolhardy and naive to some, but for W+W we start each project knowing that a voyage of creative and technical discovery awaits. With a project as intricate and as complex as this – uncertainty in initial planning actually serves the creative process better. It allows us to make discoveries and react to them based on creating working prototypes and versions, rather than second guessing the outcome of a myriad of variables.

At the start of this stage – the client was happy with where we were – but were naturally concerned that nothing looked very ‘Christian Aid’ yet. And for good reason too. We had purposefully left the style guides on a shelf gathering dust. It was time though to start tying together our initial ‘look and feel’ designs with the actual graphic style of the Poverty Over campaign.

For the build of this Infographic – we worked in weekly sprints. Each week I presented the development work to both the Agency and the Client at the same time. Credit to Tyrone at BMB who allowed this to happen and massive credit as well to Tom, the Christian Aid Marketing Director who entered into this agile spirit of things with much enthusiasm.

What did this weekly review mean? So what if there was one? You might be asking these questions….

Well -it meant that each week we would review our progress and look at our accomplishments. Where the infographic was working, where it wasn’t, why it wasn’t. Each week I would take the team feedback and then reprioritise the tasks and features that we would work on in the next sprint. I didn’t use the words Agile much and I didn’t force the idea that this was a revolutionary way of working. It was simply a weekly review of where we were at, albeit presented to the entire team as one and with a clear agenda.

In the background myself and the team were constantly working out which were the most important areas to focus on and in what order to do it in. The entire creative process felt fairly organic – but was underpinned with structure and good organisation.

As the sprints rolled past we rolled through the following features in this prioritised order:

1. Creating a palette and look and feel that a) allowed the user to read the data in the clearest way and b) was on brand for christian Aid.
2. Working out what to do with data anomalies – what happens when a country is missing data for a few years?
3. Working out what to do with countries that had changed borders, names, had been split up or merged? I can tell you a lot about history now that I didn’t know before this project!
4. How much tilt and ’3Dness’ is needed? Does the user need to spin the map a full 360 degrees?
5. How do we display contextual information? This ended up being the timeline pop ups that display key dates.
6. Do we show the future? Can we predict it? What is Christian Aid asking the user to do?
7. How else can I filter the map? We built around double the amount of filters that currently exist on the site. In the end we decided that some were simply too complex for the user to get their heads around. Sometimes less is more!
8. Allow the user to zoom in and study the detail closer.
9. Allow the user to move the map around the page.
10 How to represent scale? (One of the lessons we learned from our research is that a map must always have a scale)
11. Create an intro movie that introduces the concept
12. Create an intro movie that mimics the data and displays the correct poverty levels

There were of course many other themes and features that we worked through each week. The reality was that we were always focusing on the most important or most risky issues. As weeks went by – so many answers kept falling into place, not by design, but by discovery and by a repetitive and sensible approach to experimentation.

In the next and final instalment of this case study I will talk about our final delivery of the Infographic and all of the other elements of the website that supported it.

Poverty Over – A Case Study, Part 2 – Designing

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on March 22, 2011. Filed under Blog, production, project management, Review, work. Tagged , , , , , , , . 35 Comments.

Our Design stage for Poverty Over was a lot of fun. And fast!

We set out to explore the Look and feel of the infographic and how, in principle, it was going to work. However, it was not our intention to have all of the UI, buttons and micro detail of the infographic nailed down at the end of this stage. We intended to find a visual style, find the limits of the tech, marry the 2 together, and finish by writing a list of functionality that we could start building in the next phase.

Our Design stage was to be filled with rapid prototyping, with all members of the team around the same table. No distractions, focused on the questions we had posed from the ‘Think’ stage (How was it going to look? How would we represent the data? How far could we push the tech?).

We worked fast and without any design limitations. Corporate styleguides and other confining restrictions were ignored. Our designer, creative technologist and 3D animator worked closely together in these early stages and we experimented with colour palettes, finding the right sort of map and then the way we displayed the data.

We realised that the data worked best as a graphic device when it was displayed with differing heights of the country land levels. Poor nations were below sea level, developing countries above sea level. It felt like a nice metaphor for comparing growth and decline. We also realised that in order to show comparative data levels for all countries then all countries needed to be on display all of the time. Unfortunately this meant that an interactive spherical globe was not as effective as the flat map. We subsequently decided to use the globe concept in the intro sequence, which sets up the communcation and introduces the themes of poverty and change.

Here are some screen grabs of our various prototypes:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We spent 6 days prototyping and at the end we had come to the conclusion that technically we couldn’t use 3d models that were output from a 3d programme. In the end we decided to use the flash 3d API and some custom code to extrude the world map and draw it in 3d.

We had also been trying to add a light source, shadows and textures to the map surface. However this was causing the infographic to seriously slow down in how it rendered and moved on screen. We weighed this up and decided that the user’s ability to interact with the data was more important than adding texture effects. We knew we could make the map look great with flat colour as well. We’d just have to work within these boundaries!

So after a prototyping stage of around 7 working days we knew the method of displaying the data, the view of the map we wanted, how we were going to do it and how far we could push the tech. We also had a completely off brand colour palette and were still unsure of what else we could do with the data! At the moment we had a very straight-forward play through of the history of the world. The next challenge was to contextualise it. Why did Australia jump into huge wealth in the 1850s, what was causing Venezuela to buck the Great Depression and leap forward in the 1930s? For the data to start telling a story, we had more work to do.

We knew we couldn’t actually plan all of this stuff up front – we just didn’t know how the data was going to look at that point. We also didn’t know how many filters we should have – how many could we add before it would start to be confusing and detract from the central message? And what was the point of them?

So, we launched into our build stage, with a plan… but only a plan for the most high value and high risk elements that we planned to tackle in the next week or so. Fortunately our way of working allowed us to do this and we knew that making too many guesses at this stage would be a waste of time.

Read more about how we faced these challenges in part 3 of this case study – coming soon!

 

Poverty Over – An Interactive Infographic

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on March 15, 2011. Filed under Blog, production, work. Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , . 39 Comments.

Poverty Over

I’m really pleased to announce our latest work, in collaboration with BMB in London and for Christian Aid – check out povertyover.christianaid.org.uk.

In the coming days we’ll be blogging more about how we took this idea from scamp stage – right through to the finished product, to give you more of an insight into how we work. But now… back to the work.

The aim of the website is to show a history of poverty, illustrating that over the last two hundred years many countries have come out of poverty and have entered prosperous periods of development. Hopefully by showing that many countries can leave poverty behind, it will inspire you to invest in and develop the world’s remaining poor countries.

For WEIR+WONG – the challenge has been to visually interpret what was in effect a spreadsheet with 500 years worth of data for 285 countries. Our team of designers, developers and animators have come up with something which is genuinely compelling to look at, showing us a history of the world’s poverty and allowing us to delve deeper into the information.

In recent years there has been an explosion of Infographics on the web. Some of it looks amazing and communicates its data really well. However, there is so much of  it that looks great but is difficult to understand. The message muddled by the medium perhaps. I guess the most striking fact is that most of it is just really static. There are so many Jpegs or PDFs that warrant a first look but nothing more. We were really keen to be involved in an Infographic that was pretty, easy to understand as well as interactive.

We really enjoyed working on this project and hope that you enjoy looking at it too! The development process was extremely challenging and involved lots of collaboration from technologists, animators and developers in order to achieve this result. If you’d like to find out more, we’ll be releasing a series of case studies looking at each part of the project over the coming days, we hope you enjoy this, and we hope it encourages you to get involved to help bring poverty to an end.