Project overview and my role

The Searching Covid-19 microsite uses data journalism to explore Google Search Trends that are related to the coronavirus pandemic. It centers on a scrollytelling experience with data visualizations. As the user scrolls down the site, data points dynamically recategorize to reveal patterns in our Covid-related searching, ending with an interactive experience that allows the user to freely explore the data. I wrote the narrative text on the site that takes the user through the data visualizations to provide analysis and tell an engaging, cohesive story.

Project goals

This site is part of an ongoing project by Google News Initiative, who commissions designers to tell stories with Google Trends data through creative, experimental data journalism. For this site, Schema (the design firm I worked at) partnered with Alberto Cairo (art direction) and Axios to analyze English-language search trends related to Covid-19 and visualize the data in an engaging way for a tech-savvy public. The project took place in Spring 2020, during the first waves of pandemic chaos in the US, and the team was interested in seeing what the data might reveal and sharing those insights.

My process and content strategy

Once the data analysis and overall design concept was established, I was brought in to write the narrative that would frame and complement the data visualizations. The team set out to see if search trends could tell us anything about our response to the pandemic, and the text needed to help communicate their analysis in a journalistic voice with an interesting angle.

I first worked closely with the design and data visualization team to understand their analysis and what they most wanted to communicate to the user. With the overall scrollytelling UX design concept set, I collaborated with the team to continue developing the site’s story and create a compelling experience for the user within the interaction framework. I then wrote the text, quickly iterating and working through drafts as the team refined the design; the project’s timeline was fast-paced and had a quick, hard publishing deadline.

My writing

The text I wrote appeared on a series of cards that floated over the visualizations to provide analysis and shape each narrative beat. I also created the text that introduced graphs exploring English-language search trends from other countries (the primary visualization looked at US data). I wrote the introduction to open the site, with a compelling lead to hook the user, and the conclusion to close it.

Over the course of the site, I communicated the team’s major takeaways within a cohesive story, connected the data to real-world context, and folded in an overarching theme—our uncertainty related to the pandemic and our resulting hunger for information.

Results

The resulting site is engaging data journalism that uses innovative design and meaningful storytelling to explore our reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic through search trends. It’s a story about our collective desire for varying types of information in the face of an unfolding disaster.

Visit the site