Projects

We carried out a five-month project to redevelop the Global Obesity Observatory site for the World Obesity Federation. The organisation’s old site was needing updated and we won a tender to rebuild it, then worked really closely with the team to identify how best to do that.

The site is designed to be a repository for data around obesity, and has an enormous amount to discover. We felt it was key to make it more discoverable and the World Obesity team also wanted to ensure that, despite being data-led, the site was vibrant and made the user want to explore to find out more.

There are so many different factors that affect the way the statistics need to display and different countries and regions do things differently so there were lots of factors to take into account.

The team at the World Obesity Federation used to have to collate a lot of the statistics and manually produce a lot of the countless PDFs. The idea of the new website was to automate this as much as possible and to reduce the burden on the team.

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What we did

We used the charity’s colour palette to great effect and used a pre-existing graphing library to do the heavy lifting work for actually drawing all the charts, and globes, shown on the site.

Behind the scenes, we built innovative systems to make it easy to update the data, import new information direct from spreadsheets with the least fuss (and time) possible, and to ensure that elements such as PDF reports were updated automatically when new data became available.

Since the site launched, we have also added translations into every European language, broadening out the audience substantially. Because of the way the site works, these additional pages could be produced almost entirely automatically once the information for the additional languages was provided.

Users are also able to download copies of any charts, with branding added to them automatically in the process, and they can also combine charts into a custom PDF report or choose figures for different countries to show alongside each other on one chart.

The site is based on our in-house CMS platform, which gives us the flexibility to add new modules for specific needs. In this case, we built a number of custom elements, to handle the data and how it displays as well as to manage user accounts and other key features.

They said …