Explaining the results of the largest ever survey of British social class by letting the BBC audience ask “where do I fit?”
w/ Applied Works
Results
- Six million views in 24 hours
- The BBC website’s second most viewed page of the year
- The BBC’s most shared page ever (at that time)
- Winner of the data-driven applications category at the Global Editor’s Network Data Journalism Awards.
Process: Research, data analysis, co-creation workshops, prototyping, wireframes, UX&UI design, testing
The Great British Class Survey was a collaboration between BBC Lab UK and leading sociologists, designed to remodel traditional definitions of social class for the 21st century. It evaluated responses from 161,000 people.
Early in the project the sociologists were still processing the data, so we employed their formulae and hypotheses to design & build a prototype to demonstrate how the information could be presented in a personalised and entertaining way.
Wireframes, user flows
BBC News Online then commissioned a fully functioning ‘class calculator’ after the statistical analysis was complete.
Prototypes
Our aim was to make a serious academic study fun and easy to understand. We distilled complex data into a simple and engaging visualisation, encouraging the audience to ask “where do I fit?”
The calculator placed people in the new class model by asking them to indicate their wealth, social connections and cultural interests – the three defining measures of the new class system.
The calculator achieved six million views in 24 hours, was the BBC website’s second most viewed page of the year, and the most shared page ever. As well as being one of the biggest stories of the year, it won the data-driven applications category at the Global Editor’s Network Data Journalism Awards.
