UNESCO Institute for Statistics

Making complex data accessible to all
Yu Centrik Inc.
The Challenge

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) is the primary source for cross-nationally comparable statistics on education, science and technology, culture, and communication for more than 200 countries and territories.

Yu Centrik was tasked with redesigning the website, which is complex due to the multitude of statistical data. The site caters to and must be accessible by diverse audiences throughout the world.

Yu Centrik Inc.
The Solution

Once the interviews were executed with people around the globe, one of the many challenges was to accommodate their very different needs, so the information architecture required a lot of care and consideration.

Discussing and brainstorming the overall strategy, we started our thinking process by eliminating the idea that there should be a site for both the UIS and for it’s data. The UIS is the data. Keeping this in mind, we created an inventory of the site content. We conceived several options for the information architecture optimized for our personas.

Once our Information Architecture validated, we initiated ideation and interaction design activities according to personas – we were delighted to manage to to associate them with different pages providing varying depths and flavours of the statistical data: quite a difficult task. The navigation was optimized to allow different people to access their appropriate content ASAP, and a visual language was established to support the content-scanning behaviours of our more advanced researcher personas.

Our approach was validated with users testing throughout the user-centered design process.
To further assist our users, we designed a custom search interface suggesting both search filters and smart result shortcuts by content type. The new website should be online early 2017.

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