Yearly Editor’s Meeting

For a yearly Editor’s meeting, the client wanted to get a clear image of their changing demographic and a better understand how readers consume their journal in comparison to others.

My Role

Working in collaboration with the founder and CEO of this project, I was responsible for the ux, design and production of the annual report. The founder provided the statistical data and vision, which I took and developed into accurate visual depictions to create the story the founder envisioned.

THE STARTING POINT

Our client gave us access to the raw survey data, which the founder analyzed and manipulated, to extract crucial behavioral information. Based off of these findings, I transformed the information into bite size nuggets, which came together to tell a larger visual story on the client’s readers.

THE CHALLENGE

The biggest challenge was to come up with the right type of visualizations; detailed enough for scientists, yet simple enough to grasp at a glance. All while conveying an accurate and compelling story. We knew infographics were the only way to succinctly and effectively communicate large amounts of information.

The DESIGN PROBLEM

Making data digestible and beautiful

The research, once processed revealed many interesting habits about our client’s audience. Picking which to highlight and which to showcase would guide the design and plotline of the report. As scientists, the client expressed wanting all of the information represented in the report, but we know that it would distract the storyline and cloud the most important facts.

THE RESEARCH

The client’s survey was very comprehensive and the results were both qualitative and quantitative. This gave us an overwhelming amount of information to work with. The research communicated that the client’s audience was evolving to include more of a younger demographic, which we called “early career,” who consume and share journals a bit differently than the traditional audience. Yet there was still a strong contingency of users that had grown in their field along with the journal. It was no surprise that social media integration and interaction were more important to the early career group. All of these facts and others were compelling but didn’t provide much of a picture individually. The next steps would be to bring the facts together and create a more complete profile of this audience.

THE PROCESS

I researched current visual style trends and classic scientific journals in print and online. I was looking to get familiar with their layout patterns and typography styles. Additionally, I looked at corporate and financial reports from major corporations such as Key Jewelers and The World Bank to name a few that stood out. Once I had a good idea of the current styles I started to play with the data and different representation methods. He sketched out some quick concepts and I sketched out a few styles and we turned them into basic mockups without the actual data. Once we were happy with the style and colors, I plugged in all of the real data into the basic mockups and fleshed out the visual design.

Next, we had to work through what and how much information to display in each instance, legibility is the top priority, taking into account that our client’s perspective is from a scientific background.

The founder broke down the type of answers into different behavioral sections of how the audience searched for, consumed and shared articles. He then chose the most representative and illuminating facts and we began to create the narrative. After a few rounds of revisions we nailed down the styles, colors and typography and I produced graphs, layout and visual imagery associated with them.

THE RESULT

We wanted to not only provide the data but tell a story about our client’s readers. The report started by orienting the Editors with basic audience demographics such as what other journals they read, their age and country of residence. Next, we looked at how they consumed information online and what factors were used to determine their next article. We finished with takeaways such as reader’s preferred article features and reading devices, level of satisfaction and methods of sharing and consumption. I believe that we were able to reach a happy medium between accurate, legible, complete information all while creating a dynamic image of the client’s audience.