UNICEF

Making UNICEF’s data more appealing

Data from Unicef screenshot

Project overview

Global charity UNICEF needs little introduction. Working in 190 countries and territories across the world to save children’s lives, defend their rights and help them fulfil their potential, UNICEF’s strapline, ‘For every child’, sums up what they do, and why.

We first began working with UNICEF in 2015, when they initially engaged us for a code review on all of their websites. Since then, we have been maintaining their websites and assisting with various support requests over the past few years.

Features

  • Improved UX
  • Design overhaul
  • Modern look & feel
  • Intuitive navigation

Bringing the Data website up to date

The UNICEF data website provides reliable and open data and analysis on the situation of children and women worldwide, for use by researchers, programme managers, legislators and the media, to inform and educate.

In 2017, UNICEF renewed their brand for the first time in ten years. At the end of the year they invited us to begin discussions to redesign their data website to bring it in line with the new branding. They also wanted to make the new site easier to use and more visually appealing, thus making it more engaging and relevant to its various different audiences.

Collaborative design

Before beginning our design process, we met with UNICEF’s brand consultant to ensure we had a good understanding of the new branding so that we could create a dynamic design within the updated guidelines.

After creating the initial wireframes, the design was created using the atomic process, engaging with the UNICEF team every step of the way to ensure that all parties were happy that the new design would achieve the desired result.

screenshots of UNICEF wireframes

The final approved design makes the data much more visually appealing with the use of engaging imagery, highlighting the latest report on the homepage. As the site contains so much information we simplified the menu navigation, adding an additional drop-down menu to access statistics by topic and country.

Custom icons on the homepage linking to the various different articles and data reports make the website much easier to navigate, and introductions to further reports are highlighted with a mixture of photographs and visual representations of some of the data, to bring the statistics to life.

Data from Unicef screenshot

A strong call to action invites users to sign up for regular updates to ensure they do not miss the latest available data and analysis, and essential links are highlighted with bold colour, directing users to UNICEF’s blog and further evidence and data reports.

Data from Unicef screenshot

To make the data for each country more immediately engaging, we created a custom country page template, with a map in the header showing each country’s location, and a snapshot of key demographic data above the more detailed data information.

Data from Unicef screenshot

Once the new designs were applied, one of our developers wrote custom scripts, to allow us to migrate the large amounts of existing data across to the new website.

The Results

The result is a brand new website for UNICEF that, although it retains their established well known and instantly recognisable logo and branding, has modernised the design, bringing the website up to date for 2018.

The new site has a more focused user journey, and is therefore much easier to navigate. It’s also a much more efficient build, meaning the pages load faster and it is easier for users to quickly access the data they need from a wide range of information.

Visit the site