Revealing the Global Realities of Gender Equality in New Ways

The World Bank Group / 2021 / Economics, Gender Equality, Human Rights

The homepage of the World Bank Gender Data Portal

Overview

Graphicacy overhauled the World Bank Group’s Gender Data Portal to deliver improved organization, navigation, and data-driven storytelling power.

Launch Project

Services
CMS Integration
Data Management Solutions
Data Visualization
Geospatial Mapping
Interactive Web Applications
UX/UI Design

Background and Challenge

The World Bank Group works in every major area of development to reduce poverty and increase shared prosperity around the globe.

The World Bank’s Development Data and Gender Groups help achieve this mission by maintaining one of the largest collections of sex-disaggregated-specific data focused on women’s issues and factors such as health, education, employment, and domestic violence. This Gender Data Portal provides information essential to shaping impactful policies, improving project design, identifying data gaps, and drawing attention to urgent problems.

Graphicacy embarked on a nearly year-long process to evolve the Gender Data Portal. This massive undertaking involved complex processes including a structural revamp and a comprehensive user experience redesign. The hard work and dedication of the World Bank and Graphicacy teams ultimately enabled the data’s powerful stories to emerge like never before.

A montage of screens designed for the World Bank Gender Data Portal, by Graphicacy

Solution

The Gender Data Portal features approximately 1,000 pages, including pages for more than 200 countries. Graphicacy and the Gender and Data Groups streamlined the content by organizing it around 14 main topics (such as assets, entrepreneurship, education, and employment) with more than 200 indicator groups comprising nearly 1,000 different indicators. Here’s what the final product entailed:

The Navigation: Graphicacy replaced the Portal’s one-dimensional dashboards with a home page presenting several options for exploring data. Clicking a topic card now leads to a richer topic profile with visualizations of key indicators, a list of all indicators within that topic, and links to related content beyond the Portal.

Users can also choose country profiles to see snapshots of gender data with visualized indicators across all topics. Graphicacy built charts showing how a selected country compares to its corresponding region, income group, or the world. Simple prompts allow users to move easily across sections and see comparative data, a task that previously required multiple clicks.

The Stories: Data on its own may work for economists and data specialists, but reaching a broader audience requires context. Graphicacy designed the new Portal to emphasize contextual storytelling. Brief paragraphs of text, generated by an algorithm, now accompany many of the interactive visualizations.
The Look: To immediately establish a more approachable tone, Graphicacy incorporated a colorful palette and friendlier typography into the overall Portal design. Large text callouts along with color-coded text and charts help make the Portal more welcoming to users of all backgrounds.
Making an Impact with the Data: With a more accessible Portal, the World Bank’s Gender and Data Groups aims to attract researchers, advocates, journalists, and others who will give the data a life of its own. The greater the exposure, the greater the chance gender data will reach policymakers and others in a position to take action.

The Gender and Data Groups leadership team feels confident the new Portal will soon become the go-to source for gender data on two fronts: tracking the need for parity around the world and showing where gaps in data remain.