When the 2015 romantic drama “The Theory of Everything” was released, I was asked to make the physicist Stephen Hawking relevant to millennials to drive ticket sales. I investigated how Stephen Hawking is connected to today’s generation, and discovered that he is not only a legend in science and technology, but has made numerous appearances in pop culture, from Legally Blonde to Star Trek. We decided to create an interactive, taxonomic data visualization that fans could engage with to find how they are connected to Stephen Hawking, and I defined its information architecture and content strategy.
Challenges
- Creating a content inventory that was part of the development process, yet intuitive to non-developers
- Finding diverse content when the majority of Hawking articles online contained redundant information
- Defining the visualization structure for a massive amount of content
Information Architecture
I created a content inventory to categorize and pull existing articles and media about Hawking on the web. Once I had collected many articles, I combed through them to define overarching categories they fell into: technology, science, and pop culture. From these categories, I further defined subcategories to make the visualization navigable through an organized hierarchy. For example, the main category “science” included connections that fell under subcategories such as “phenomena”, “cosmology”, and “scientists”. “Phenomena” were then further specified by “time travel”, “black holes”, and “space”.
An excerpt from the content inventory, which includes 132 items and additional columns
Devising an organizational hierarchy enabled us to implement a personalization engine that guided users to connections tailored to their interests. We provided users the options to jump directly and freely navigate the data visualization on their own, or select a series of criteria to narrow into specific connections.
Initial page
“Find A Connection” page
The Result
By researching and categorizing information, we were able to form a data visualization that allowed users to explore and share an image of their own personal connection to Stephen Hawking. We achieved an 88% view rate and 4.4% click-through rate, leading tens of thousands of visitors to the movie’s website. “The Theory of Everything” collected more than twice its production budget at the box office, and won five Oscar nominations.
