Better insights, better decisions, better lives.
I've done a variety of work for the
Ministry of Social Development, and while a significant portion of it is not public facing, some work is published and publicly available.
Benefit Fact Sheets Snapshot
The BFS Snapshot is a recurring report that covers high-level trends in the benefit system.
While designing the snapshot, I had to take into consideration that I wasn't just making a layout for the current content, but also (it being a recurring report) the content of every version of this report for the foreseeable future. Therefore, I made the layout have ample room around each section of body text in case room for extra content is required.
The layout maintains a lot of consistency between pages; this serves a dual purpose:
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Making it easier for the reader to find the information on each page, as each page has the same types of information in the same spot. To differentiate the different sections, I used a change in theme color, as this made it easier to skim search.
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Making it easier for the report to be automated. The report's graphs were made in R, and so it was important to minimize the complexity of the code so that it's easier to maintain.
StudyLink Statistics
This is a recurring set of reports that covers high-level trends in financial assistance for students.
There is one dashboard that supplies an overview of both Student Loans and Student Allowance, and there are a pair of documents that cover each topic area separately.
The dashboard required clear sectioning for each section, which was accomplished via the title bars and faint background coloring on each graph.
The two A4 documents had to contend with similar design constraints as the BFS, but as the automation pipeline for this document used Excel rather than R, it's a lot easier to adjust the proportions of the graphs for each iteration. For this reason, the graphs were allowed to grow to fill the space available.
The tables of data presented a challenge, as the width of the columns could change wildly between editions.
