Meet Seven Unforgettable Families
An immersive digital experience sharing World Vision’s work in urban India
Over the past century, millions of people in India have been moving from rural villages to urban centers. India’s cities are bursting at the seams. For a chance at a brighter future, families are willing to risk everything and move into the crush and roar of a metropolis, where a new set of opportunities — and dangers — await.
This massive migration led two creatives at World Vision to pitch a powerful idea: What if India’s urbanization could be understood on an intimate scale?
The overarching narrative of migration can perhaps be best understood by listening to the individual stories of parents and children who have undertaken these journeys. World Vision managing editor Elizabeth Hendley and senior photographer Eugene Lee sought an immersive digital experience that could capture the hearts and minds of readers and take them to the streets of India’s booming cities. They reached out to Journey Group, a long-term partner, to make their vision a reality.
“If we didn’t have the confidence in our working relationship with Journey Group, this story would have never gotten off the ground.” — Elizabeth Hendley
From the beginning, Hendley said, she and Lee wanted to work with Journey Group, even before finalizing a concept for the piece.
“If we didn’t have the confidence in our working relationship with Journey Group, this story would have never gotten off the ground,” she said. “We never would have attempted it.”
The challenge
The World Vision team chose to feature seven families in two major cities in India: Agra and Delhi. Hendley and Lee wanted to capture parallel stories and images from each of the families they met in these cities, and Journey Group’s digital studio team was invited to plan the piece before the big trip.
A robust planning endeavor, led by Journey Group’s creative director, was an essential first step. Lee’s skill in a wide range of media formats, including photography, video, audio and 360-degree panoramas, meant that it was critical to specify the shots in advance. And Hendley’s talent as a journalist was directed to gathering as much consistent information as possible from each of the people she interviewed.
For readers to have a seamless experience from family to family, consistency among all media assets was key. In an effort to frame the story before it was built, the Journey Group team created low-fidelity wireframes to structure components of the individual family stories and the piece as a whole.
Broadly speaking, the piece was focused on India’s urbanization, but the stories of seven families had to be given proper significance. An animated map, which would communicate the approximate distance each family traveled, was proposed to complement the stories and show scope. The individual profiles would also incorporate how such vast issues as pollution, sexism, transportation and health could affect each family differently. Working in this supplementary context was an important design and content challenge for the teams to solve.
As Hendley and Lee prepared to travel in fall 2016, they had regular check-ins with the Journey Group team, so that they were ready to adapt to the reality on the ground in India but come back with parallel and powerful content.
The work
When Hendley and Lee returned, they had an abundance of incredible material. They were both energized and equipped to bring the stories to life. “When we came back, the work was really just execution, because we had a plan from the beginning with Journey Group,” Hendley said.
As the Journey Group team assessed the available content, the interface design was sharpened to focus on the story’s overall message. The families Hendley and Lee met were moving from one kind of poverty to another, facing new and unfamiliar obstacles in the city and then finding sustainable help from World Vision.
The text and multimedia had to work seamlessly together, so that readers felt immersed in the piece from the first glimpse. With the ample media resources, the team was careful to balance the design and content: The piece had to elevate the families’ complex stories and resist drowning readers in media.
Whether following Lee’s video work through winding streets, panning around a home in 360 degrees or scrolling through a gallery, the media assets were considered carefully, keeping the reader perpetually in mind. A significant technical investment in the piece was ensuring that all of the media didn’t slow the page load down to a crawl. Journey Group’s developer delivered on-demand loading for the high-quality video and images, ensuring that a mobile reader would have an engaging story experience without draining his or her data for the month.
The stories themselves were also given prominence. Visitors can read comfortably and remain engaged with the primary story, thanks to the balance between media and white space. To work in the supplementary information, the designers and developers created an intuitive experience for sidebars, with specially styled hyperlinks and off-canvas windows to present the short text and an additional photograph.
The Journey Group team also worked within the boundaries of World Vision’s existing content management system, integrating this immersive experience within Wordpress. Working with World Vision’s development team, the Journey Group developers helped make improvements across the board to their CMS, giving additional functionality and updating the typography system throughout the site.
The result
“Seven Families, Seven Journeys” is a celebration of the powerful work of World Vision in Delhi and Agra — as well as the excellent journalism of their team.
The piece shines a light on these families’ lives, which are so often rendered invisible. The stories acknowledge that while donors’ gifts have made a huge impact in these cities, challenges still remain. With an immersive experience, readers can see where these families live and what they endure, witnessing their daily perseverance and joy.
As an agency, Journey Group loves helping tell stories like this: stories that are unafraid to confront the very human mix of darkness and hope.
“We didn’t limit ourselves at all in how we were thinking about the project,” Hendley said, “because we knew that whatever crazy idea we had, Journey Group would make it crazier or execute it in a professional, sophisticated way, in exactly the way we had been thinking.”
Discover “Seven Families, Seven Journeys” at World Vision. For more from Journey Group, sign up for our monthly digest of great stories: Story Matters.
