The world’s first comprehensive online quantative encyclopedia of religious cultural history.
The Database of Religious History (DRH) is one of the flagship initiatives of the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC), based at the University of British Columbia.
The DRH aims to bring together data on cultural systems throughout history that will allow statistical analysis, the discovery of new patterns in world history, and the testing of hypotheses about the evolution of human behaviour.
I was the User Interface Designer, working alongside Billy So.
The DRH team consisted of a small group of academics and software engineers from UBC. I joined the team about a year in after the development phase had already started.
The problem that we were trying to solve was ensuring the accuracy of the database, which relies on the knowledge of the religious experts who would be using the tool. In order to do that, we had to build a website that was easy-to-use and improved the data entry workflow.
Working with the lead UX Designer, Billy So, a sitemap and several user flows were created to document the experience of the current web application. From there, we identified certain areas in the flow that needed improvement. We narrowed it down to a handful of features that needed to be built or redesigned, and got buy-in from the team to commit to this work.
For each of the new features, I was responsible for:
Creating wireframes to communicate how the user would accomplish each of those tasks
Delivering high-fidelity interface mockups to ensure an appealing look & feel
Testing the interaction and usability of these interfaces through front-end prototypes
Over the course of a year and a half, we designed the new flows that helped users complete a number of complex tasks.
We created a dashboard that introduces progress trackers to encourage users to reach 100% completion on their entries.
A simple 3-step process to define all of the values required to create a new entry.
The UI that allows users to contribute data to the database.
An extensive browse feature that allows users to look up existing entries in the database.
Users can select specific variables and import the data it into a map, bar chart, or line graph.