Christian Laesser

This project originated in Google News Lab asking Moritz Stefaner whether he would like to work on a project for the German election. He said yes and asked me if I wanted to support him and Dominikus Baur. I was very interested in the cooperation. First of all, I was impressed by the opportunity to work together with the two experienced designers as well as developers. I was also curious what the Google Trends data can tell about the election. We narrowed down the project to solve the two following questions: How do people search for the different candidates? And what are they really interested in? We worked with data from an early stage and iterated many ideas. You can see the final outcome on 2Q17.de — from the daily detailed word cloud per candidate to a comprehensive overview of the entire election year.

1. 

   Data Exploration

   Moritz started early on with the data exploration. That helped us to select promising data visualizations and think about possible components for the website.

2. 

   Information Architecture and Interaction Design

   We started the actual design process with the orchestration of the various components. We used the idea of the semantic zoom to arrange the components according to their level of detail.

3. 

   Wireframes

   Wireframes were used to quickly iterate over different ideas for each component.

4. Component behaviors

   In addition to the visual treatments, we also thought about the behaviors of the different interface elements. For example, Dominkus and Moritz built prototyping environment to be able to test different ways to interact with the word cloud.

5. 

   Visual Identity

   After we finalized the overall functions and behaviors, we created a brief visual identity for the project by setting colors, the font and creating a simple wordmark.

6. 

   Visual Design

   By bringing all the different design components together, we applied a general look and feel for the entire site.

7. 

   Promotional Material

   In addition to the website, we designed promotional material to share on social media channels like animated gifs of the word cloud or a 7-day trends visualization.

Our project has been covered by many news channels such as FAZ, Welt, Horizont, SWR, RTL and so on. In addition, we were able to support the journalistic coverage of the election with our embeddable components, as you can see by looking at Spiegel Online.

It was great to work with Moritz, Dominikus and the people at Google News Labs (Isabelle Sonnenfeld, Jörg Pfeiffer, Simon Rogers, Alberto Cairo). I learned a lot from this cooperation for my own work. It was impressive to see how much time Dominikus and Moritz took for different parts of the project to produce the best result. In addition to that, the project provided me with further political education during the 6 months.