Tria G.

Overview
Santa’s Real Elves is an interactive article to celebrate those who are still working during Christmas. This article tackles their stories as they go through just another working day, while most Filipinos simply celebrate.

Problem statement
The publication aims to showcase a different kind of Christmas, which is true the perspective of those who have no choice but to work on this holiday. Interactive articles are one of the ways The GUIDON wants to innovate their method of story-telling. It aims to go beyond the traditional print to create multimedia piece designed to engage the readers.

Role & audience
I am the web designer for this interactive article. The audience will be the Ateneo student body who are the general readers of the publication’s articles and posts.

Process
Research & analysis
This was my first interactive as a member of the Digital Development staff of THE GUIDON. It was also the first interactive article to be released by the publication for the year. It was a collaboration between the writers, photographers, illustrator, and me as the designer. The main theme is about Christmas for working people.

For the interactive, I thought about the idea of having a Christmas tree display as the main page. It should have warm and vibrant colors to it, to commemorate the festive holiday. The ornaments of the tree would be clickable to show the stories of the workers to be interviewed. The reason why I had an idea of incorporating the ornaments specifically Christmas balls as the main interaction of the article is because when they click on one Christmas ball, the user would “enter their world” and experience what the workers are going through during Christmas. Additionally, the christmas balls itself would contain objects that symbolizes the workers, and having it inside a “ball” would stand for the different “worlds” they have as a worker.

Article rationale and outline

The rest of the project team loved the idea, and I worked with the graphic designer assigned to the interactive to help here with the illustrations I had in mind.

For the title of the article, I had a pretty hard time thinking of what can encapsulate all their stories in one phrase. I asked help and ideas from my own friends, and we all agreed in one suggestion that was made. To commemorate these hardworking people, they are truly Santa’s real elves.

Prototyping & interactive elements
The interactive is pretty straightforward as it really just centers the Christmas tree in the main page. To make the user understand the interactions of the articles, we added instructions to scroll down and click on the ornaments to read their stories. On hover, you would see each christmas gift tag to show the names of the workers and what they do for a living. When clicked, a light box would just show for the user to read each article.

Christmas ornaments on hover

Results and lessons learned
Santa's Real Elves interactive article was published on December 2019. It was released on Christmas Day to let people read the narratives of these three people who spend their holidays at work.

Project takeaways
Looking back at it now, I added some extra scrolls that the user has to do before showing the ornaments. These are unnecessary and it would have been better to just go straight to the tree in only one scroll. This is a reminder that I should focus on what the main use case of the project is, in this case is to read the article. As designers, we have the freedom to interpret and create the way we send the message to the users, but we must first and foremost ask ourselves if the solution that we’ve designed results to a relevant and meaningful experience to the users. Even if it is an interactive article, we should make sure the interaction design is properly used and utilized, and not just because we just want to make things move. If in doubt, there are always still ways to discover, explore, and test it out!

Thank you to the writers Keziah Maru Z. Pasion, Andrea Tibayan, and Andrea Mikaela Llanes, as well as the illustrator, Mika Medina, and developer Harvey Sison for working with me in this project.

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