Introducing: Wikimina
A data visualization project to show amazing women around the globe
Imagine something that you like a lot. It can be anything, from art and design to car race — anything. Now try to remember someone that you consider a badass in this work field. Is this person you recognized a woman by any chance? If your answer is “yes” then you’re part of the minority that identifies a woman as an inspiring figure.
Most people tend to have a male figure in mind when answering this simple question. This doesn’t mean that amazing women don’t exist around, just that they don’t have the same visibility as men. When we realized this, we decided to create Wikimina, a project by Flama. This project aims to give more representativity for women, from several areas, showing the amount of incredible women the world has and the amazing things they can do. We believe that by meeting more inspiring female figures, other women can feel more inspired and encouraged to do anything they want.
After some team meetings, we decided that a good way to show that we do have a lot of women acting in the most distinct places would be through an interactive graph. To create an incredible project we went to a process involving:
- User research
- Branding
- Visual design
- UI/UX design
- Decisions
- Positioning
Decisions we made
Positioning
To start this project we had to make some decisions about who our audience would be and how our product would affect them. We decided to focus on women that have some knowledge about the issue we are working on — lack of women representativity — and that are also looking for inspiring female figures.
Our goal here isn’t to educate or introduce feminism to anyone. What we want is to add lots of excellent and powerful female characters to the day-to-day woman, so she can be inspired and become a badass herself. Feminism transformation is a consequence of this project.
Moreover, we set five attributes to Wikimina — inspirational, informational, thoughtful, spreader and aggregator. Once those attributes were set, we tried hard to meet all of them in the final product’s characteristics, so that we could have the right impact on users.
Researching
At Flama we work with human-centered design. This project wasn’t any different.
To ensure that we were creating an efficient product, that met user expectations, we proposed ourselves that we had to interact with the users at least once a week. To achieve this goal, we used two different user interaction approaches:
User Research
We conducted some personal interviews and applied online forms to several women looking to validate our hypothesis and gather information about their perception on female representativity.
User Test
To make sure that our product was understandable and efficient we developed prototypes and conducted usability tests with our users. From the results of each test, we iterate other prototypes followed by more tests, to achieve an appropriate final result to our product.
Visualizing
Color
Since the intention was to impact and empower users with our product, we had to define visual aspects that matched our purposes. Based on this, we made some research and tests to set a striking color palette. As the final result, we chose very common colors in the female universe, purple and pink. However, we work with it in a non-obvious and stereotyped way. We decided to use strong shades of this colors, creating a powerful and outstanding environment
Graphic
For our chart, we looked at demonstrating the female presence in many areas and places across the years. From this starting point, it was possible to create insights about the presence of women in all chosen categories — especially after 1900 in some work fields and specific places.
We also decided to represent that all women are equal, and each one has a part of importance in the struggle for the representativity and conquest of feminine space.
That way we can focus on what we want — badass women through time and space — putting them in the same way as incredible people instead of creating competition between them.
Coding
We chose to use react.js as our main library for it is a great component-oriented, functional-friendly, easy-to-start modern library. Also, our developers were starting to get in contact with it within parallel projects, so Wikimina’s codebase would be the perfect breeding ground for new ideas and approaches using this tool.
By that point, we already knew that the whole app would live within a single page. The idea to make it backend agnostic was mostly a natural succession. So, we went for that.
We love Ruby on Rails, but developing a full Rails app just to hold, serve and update a database would be expensive, slow and unnecessarily hard, so went for alternative backend solutions, and we found that Google Sheets has a well-documented, powerful and free API for public and private sheets. Using it allowed us to focus on the frontend development, without worrying about database maintenance.
The Final Product
As you may already have noticed, our goal here was to make you, day-to-day woman, meet several fantastic women in your field of study or work. And we did it.
We present you with http://wikimina.flama.is
Plans for the future
We want more. This platform is as good as the amount of amazing woman data we collect. So we want to turn it into a collaborative effort. We want to make you capable of inputting your female references, so we have this rich and live database!
And we still need to work more on the mobile version, it's a big challenge to work with data visualization on a small screen. We were just very excited to show you what we've done. =)
Excited to help?
You can start by spreading the word. Share on facebook, twitter or google+, share with family, friends, but especially with that girl you know that need a source of inspiration.
