When I joined the Datlas project, it was already a robust project leveraging proprietary visualizations to explore the economic landscape of Colombia.
I spent several weeks assessing the UX of the existing site and proposed a set of pragmatic interventions that could be accomplished before the site launched. These included:
proposing a reworked landing page with clearer language and hierarchy,
introducing persistent header navigation on all interior pages,
simplification of url path routing,
wrapping existing data visualizations with better contextual information, and
refinement of color palette and typography throughout the site.
One area of focus was the site’s existing data visualizations. They were sophisticated but often lacking in the appropriate UX wrappers for users to really engage with them. There were also areas of opportunity for new, more dense presentations of existing data:
Once the initial audit was complete and agreed upon, I spent several months embedded in the development team of the Growth Lab, implementing these proposals as well as providing design and frontend development support prior to launch. I was an active contributor to the team’s code base, working specifically with the site’s Ember frontend templates, Less stylesheets, D3 visualizations, and custom icon fonts.