Alexa Steinbrück

In 2016 I was selected for a fellowship of the Google News Initiative during which I had the opportunity to work with the journalists inside the newsroom of German newspaper Zeit Online in Berlin. One of the projects I was contributing to was a joint project between the ressorts „Investigative/Data“ and „Interactive“.

Streets and squares are an archive of both language and history. We suspected that their names would reveal patterns, and we wanted to make them visible. Doing such a thing is impossible using conventional map tools because none of them will show you all of the streets and squares of the same name at the same time.

Among other things I created the missing map tool referred to in the quote above. The result was a web app for analyzing a given dataset of geodata (streets and squares) with regards to geographical and linguistic patterns using e.g. Regular Expressions

At the beginning this tool was used only internally by journalists of Zeit Online. After a design overhaul the tool was made available for all readers too.

But this research tool was actually only the basis for a much bigger publication by Zeit Online „Streetscapes“ which earned a Information is Beautiful Award in 2018. It was also nominated for the Grimme-Online Award.

Wearing the hat of the Creative Technologist I also experimented with more adventurous visualizations of geodata. The images below show various experiments with masking/filtering and sorting of streets by different parameters.

If you want to read more about the project: Here's a description of the methodology and the data used for the project.

Also, you can check out the live tool.

In a cross-functional and specialized team (User Interface, User Experience, Frontend, Backend) we developed this application from the ground up. Since I was focusing purely on Frontend development I could put all my energy in making the code high quality and maintainable. My team and I were actively practising pair-programming and test-driven development (TDD).

This is the another project I contributed to during my fellowship at Zeit Online. BitPoll was a fast-lane project initiated by the chief editor of Zeit Online. It was designed, coded and deployed within one single week. The application was used by 273.000 users worldwide.

If you want to read more about BitPoll: Here is some background information including the methodology for the project (in German language only)

The task was the following:

• ⚪ Rebuild the existing platform from the ground up using a modern technology stack
• ⚪ Develop a new information architecture that reflects the current focus of the programme
• ⚪ Create a new (corporate) design Visualize the wealth of collected data in a more user-friendly way

During this project I was working with a small cross-functional team, that was also highly international (Japan, US, Macedonia, Netherlands, Germany). In the first stage of the project, I was working directly at the Headquarters of the United Nations in close collaboration with the stakeholders. (In the later stage, I was working remotely from Germany)

Some background: According to the Stockholm International Peace Resarch Institute (SIPRI), UNROCA is „the key international mechanism of official transparency on arms transfers“. UNROCA was established by a General Assembly resolution in 1991 and is since managed by the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) based at the Headquarters in New York. The term „conventional arms“ refers to weapons that are not weapons of mass destruction.

What I did:

• ✔️ Coordinated project phases and deliverables
• ✔️ Communicated and listened carefully to the stakeholders while collecting requirements
• ✔️ Conducted a content audit with the stakeholders
• ✔️ Developed a new information architecture
• ✔️ Designed the pages and developed a new corporate design
• ✔️ Architected and implemented the Frontend with Angular.js, D3 and Bootstrap
• ✔️ Defined the requirements for the Frontend-facing API in close collaboration with the other Backend developer
• ✔️ Developed the Backend with Python & Django

More things I did:

• ✔️ Presented the finalized web platform to a group of governmental experts (GGE) at a UN conference in Geneva with a demo and a subsequent Q&A
• ✔️ Introduced and trained the UN staff on how to use the CMS of the new platform

The datavisualisation part was most exciting:

• ✔️ Conceived and implemented a new data visualization strategy
• ✔️ Presented and introduced the stakeholders to contemporary types of data visualization
• ✔️ Created data visualization prototypes on paper and as vector graphics in Sketch
• ✔️ Developed the data visualizations with Angular & D3

Some sketches of the early stage datavisualisation research:

One of the stabilised design solutions prototyped as vector graphic in Sketch:

And the finalized version in HTML/SVG and CSS and with real data:

I wrote a full case study about this project focusing on the data visualization aspect. Developing those data visualizations was an exciting research process between UX concepts, political sensitivities, and technical challenges! I wanted to illustrate the iterative nature of the design process and give a place to visually interesting interim solutions.

Read the case study here