Google Global Impact
role: Creative Director/Strategy & User Experience Design
UX & AI: Megan Hansen
Art Direction: Jason Strand
Motion Design: Emily Skaer
Overview
What do the current presidential administration, a prince from Saudi Arabia, and members of Greenpeace all have in common? They were all taken to the Global Impact exhibit at Google's Headquarters in Mountain View as one of their first experiences.
Initiated by Google's Policy team, the Global Impact project was designed to serve as a gateway experience for VIPs visiting Google Headquarters to discuss policy issues of all stripes. Whether they're visiting to talk about green energy, data privacy, or child literacy, this exhibit was designed to share the immense amount of social good that the company is doing around the world—while also showing in real-time how that is relevant to each individual visitor and it impacts their own communities.
Bringing a new experience to an existing space
One of the biggest strategic and design challenges of this project was transforming an already existing exhibit space to house this entirely new experience.
We began by looking at the environment, understanding how people interact with it, then deciding how to evolve it. The primary space is comprised of nine screens covered in a highly reflective mirrored surface, and a single touch-enabled podium as the sole point of interaction. To best understand the ways in which visitors would interact with the exhibit space, we created prototype experience in the actual exhibit and conducted a day of on-site playtesting. This allowed us to observe how visitors might interact with the space and gave us key insights into the experiential relationship between the interactive podium and content display area.
We also gained a valuable understanding into the environment itself. Because the main displays we coated in a highly reflective material, as outside light came in, it could affect the view of the screens, making them harder to read, especially for those with less than perfect vision. Seeing this in person helped us make necessary adjustments to the overall visual language including color, contrast, and copy size.
NAVIGATIOn IA Development
The information architecture was both one of the most critical elements of the projects and one of the most complicated. With content sourced from groups throughout Google, and formatted in everything from websites, to PowerPoints, to archived printouts, creating a simple system for organizing all of it in a way that would be clear both for the Policy team but also for visitors was no easy task. This was made even more complex by the fact that all stories needed to be contextualized both geographically and based on content.
To build a UI that supported the geographical discovery of stories, we created a system that could display content attached to specific cities, states, or countries, but also that spanned less defined regions such as "The South". Further we needed a system that should show what program a story was part of and whether multiple stories were contained within a region. To make things just a little more challenging, all of this needed to be accomplished on a touchscreen that supported only basic tap and drag gestures.
