Totaljobs
World of Work Enemies

Storytelling website
Role: Data analysis and design lead
Studio: Beyond Words Studio
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The challenge
Totaljobs often distributes surveys around a theme to their job seekers and platform users. For this project, they conducted a survey about enemies in the workplace to see how common this phenomenon was.

They then tasked Beyond Words Studio with producing a long-form narrative piece that tells the story of enemies in the workplace using qualitative and quantitative data from their survey combined with insights from workplace culture experts Good & Co.
Data analysis and structure
Survey data is notoriously hard to interrogate but from working with Totaljobs many times over the years we started to develop a system of working with their data and eventually developed an internal tool that allowed us to quickly and efficiently find the most interesting stories.

Since the data is too big to interrogate in full we started by compiling a list of stories or questions we thought might lead to interesting data stories:
  1. What percentage of workers have work enemy? Do they have more than one?
  2. How does this split across demographics (age/gender)?
  3. What level of seniority is the enemy?
  4. What behaviours were most/least disliked in the workplace?
  5. How does having a work enemy make workers feel?
  6. How does having an enemy affect workers daily lives?
  7. Do workers have a nickname for their enemy?

As we interrogated the data, some stories might were more interesting than others. It’s all about casting the net wide and narrowing down on the most fascinating aspects of the data.

Once we settled on some key data stories we started to arrange them into a story structure with the following themes:

  1. What are the top line stats of enemies in the workplace?
  2. Who does our work enemy look like?
  3. What can’t we stand about our work enemy?
  4. How does having a work enemy affect us?
  5. How can we handle our work enemy?
Visual research: From left-to-right, Space Invaders screen 1982, Space invader icons,  Home arcade image
Wireframing and visual research
We started by wireframing the concept moving from low-fidelity to high-fidelity mock-ups. The low-fidelity wireframes will always include the working text for the piece so the client can start to feedback on real content and data stories in situ.

Meanwhile, we began collecting visual research and putting together a moodboard for the client. We knew early on that this piece would be inspired by the 8-bit animated icons in arcade games but also had to fit within the Totaljobs brand guidelines.
Data visualization devices inspired by 8-bit arcade illustrations
Data visualization and design
‍We wanted to keep the data visualization devices simple (since the users would be the general public), but had a unique opportunity to play on the idea of 8-bit illustrations which is evident in the ‘Where do they work?’ space-invaders inspired piece which is even interactive as a mini-game.

We were also able to develop really unique illustrations throughout the piece that were inspired by the icons and characters in arcade games. These icons really helped bring the whole piece together.
Mobile designs
Design and implementation
‍The final design is a vibrant and enticing long-form narrative interspersed with playfully illustrated icons and clean, simple data visualizations that add context and colour to the story. The website has a touch of animation that isn’t too distracting and is triggered as the user scrolls to bring life to the illustrations. This website works on all screen sizes.
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O
Over the years at Beyond Words Studio I had the pleasure of working on several Totaljobs projects:
→ Imposter phenomenon: Exploration of how workers feel like imposters in the workplace
→ Subject to change: Storytelling piece on how workers hide their true selves at work
→ Gender bias decoder: Decoder that allows users to paste in a job advert and tweak the language to remove gender bias