Google & Equal Justice Initiative
Google and the Equal Justice Initiative joined together to tell the stories of families affected by the history of racial terror in America.
See the full project here
UX Challenges
For 28 years, EJI has been conducting research and collecting data about the effects of lynching in America during the era of racial terror, from 1865 to 1950. During this difficult time in America’s history, over 4,000 people of color were lynched by white Americans and there has never been justice for the victims and their families. We turned this data into a collection of interactive maps and stories that greatly expanded access to EJI’s work. EJI wanted to bring this history back to the front of our collective political consciousness in a way that forces us to confront our country’s dark past and the legacy it left for so many families.
One of the many challenges of this project was the subject matter. We acknowledge that this isn’t easy for many users to face, which is why the content was presented through different mediums: audio stories, data on interactive maps and a short film. We needed to find a way to create a through-line weaving these three different storytelling media together to form a continuous narrative. Through the content hierarchy, we also needed to balance real, human stories with EJI’s data.
For this project, it was especially important that the content is as accessible as possible, which is why we worked from a mobile-first design perspective to guarantee an equally good experience on both mobile and desktop.