Liquor & Gaming NSW, Talkward Talkward During my time at United Yeah, I worked on a creative project for Liquor and Gaming NSW. The brief was to create a platform where people could reach out to friends and family affected by problem gambling. The experience was built on the idea of ‘starting a conversation’ by sending a personalised e-card. I had a central role within this project in generating and realising the campaign idea and developing the visual execution of both the UI screens and e-card illustrations. Visit talkward.com.au Client: Liquor & Gaming NSW Industry: Government Duration 6 months Collaboration: Team at United Yeah Project Skills: Comparative Research, Stakeholder Meetings, Responsive Web Design, Sketching, Illustration, Visual Design, Interaction Design Framing the Problem Problem Gambling affects many Australian’s and starting a conversation can be a sensitive and often awkward one to have with someone dealing with a problem. Through research provided by the client, we were able to determine the key problem to tackle; that the conversation around problem gambling is often difficult and awkward, especially for those close to or related to the person affected. The Approach Our approach to the brief was to try and ‘ease the awkwardness’ of the conversation by developing a playful way to communicate this serious issue. By creating the animations around the idea of ‘awkward situations’, we wanted to enable users to reach out to start a conversation, highlighting that there are more awkward situations in life than this. This was when ‘talkward’ was born; “Don’t make the talk awkward”. A key decision was to use animated illustration with gender/race/age-neutral characters to make the platform accessible to all audiences. There is not one ‘type’ of person that problem gambling can effect. The character illustrations also allowed us to make the visuals more engaging by adding humour. Working within the constraints of sending an e-card, the approach was to create a campaign landing page to house this along with a supporting social media campaign, leveraging Gambling Help’s existing social sites to drive traffic back to the site to get users to create and send e-cards. Developing the Information Architecture The main goal was to get users to create e-cards and start a conversation around problem gambling, so this was the primary focus of the site. We included multiple sections on the site to inform users as to what the platform was about and provide links to existing helpful content through Gambling Help’s website. The E-card Generator In collaboration with the team, I worked to develop the walkthrough screens for the e-card builder. To help users easily complete the process, we spaced out the questions over single pages with clear instructions of what action to take next using colour as a visual cue throughout. Giving people confidence to send an e-card resulted in the decision to show a counter of the number of e-card created, “you’re not the only one”! Once the e-card was created, we restricted the platform to only allow share-ability via copying a link or emailing the link. This required users to connect directly with the person they were sending the e-card too, preventing it being sent anonymously causing potential damage to the receiver. Iterations Through some guerilla testing of the app we made some tweaks to the design to help users successfully create an e-card. Users were getting confused at what they were actually creating so we changed the text screens on step one to be gifs of the actual animation. Users also felt that the initial text was quite confronting, so we changed this from a ‘situation’ to a ‘conversation’. Project Launch To support the launch of the website, we ran a social media campaign through Facebook and Instagram to draw attention to the issue and direct people through to the e-card generator. We created series of images using funny awkward situations as an extension of the site’s content to raise awareness. The concept around this was ‘somethings in life are awkward, but starting a conversation around problem gambling doesn’t have to be’. We saw a large volume of social interaction with the supporting content driving 51k site visits, and around 1000 e-cards generated. Key Learnings This project taught me a lot about time management and working with developers. As there were many moving parts along the way, with some project unknowns, it was important to have clear communication to ensure we could deliver the final result in the required time frame. If I were to do this again, I would invest more time into user testing early on in the project to ensure the hi-fidelity screens were effective. Project Skills Comparative Research Stakeholder Meetings Responsive Web Design Sketching Illustration Visual Design Interaction Design Project Tools Indesign Photoshop Illustrator Invision