Strategy& Timeline

Challenge

As parent company Booz Allen Hamilton was preparing to celebrate its 100-year history, global strategy firm Strategy& engaged us to create an immersive touch-based interactive timeline that would be the centerpiece of a company celebration, as well as be made available on the Web.

Approach

With an extremely tight deadline, the team dove in with a clear plan.

• A content assessment was conducted to understand the breadth and depth of the material; however, much of the content was still being gathered by an international team as we moved forward. We did begin to see patterns in how the information might be intuitively navigated.
• We conducted collaborative design workshops to gauge how our experience was mapping to content expectations.
• An Agile development process was followed to quickly establish a fully functional MVP of core features as additional materials continued to arrive. With this realistic model in place, we noticed gaps in the design approach and were able to shift our approach early—fail fast.
• Created a scalable timeline structure that grouped milestones into clear historical eras and content categories.
• Designed filtering controls for narrowing the experience by theme, region, date, content type, sector, and organization.
• Developed detail overlays that combined narrative content, imagery, related themes, and links without losing the visitor’s place in the timeline.
• Optimized the interface for large touchscreen displays and informal, walk-up use.

Result

This project is one of my favorite examples of how deep collaboration with visual design, content creators, and development led to a radically different — and better — experience than what had been approved in UX.

Due to the aggressive delivery date and the challenges of stakeholders’ international schedules, we had to get early XD approval based on instincts and iterate as we progressed into development. We learned that a vertical stream of content was a far more compelling and natural way to explore this material on touch devices. We quickly changed direction. The experience was a highlight of the centenary celebration.