Katha - A storytelling UX

Katha

Product & Project Brief:

Led a small team at Katha (Katha Digital Lab), to digitally re-brand Katha- an award winning publishing house and NGO in India, working in literacy to literature continuum.

We connected the dots between social media channels and websites, to compress five sites into two.

Also, Katha's #300mChallenge campaign recently got awarded for Digital Empowerment Foundation's Social media for Empowerment award for our digital marketing & product by Def & Facebook!

Re-design & development goals:

- Collecting and representing the organisation's 30 years of rich history in publishing fabulous books and doing award winning interventions

- Making the interface as fun and interactive as our books for children, and yet inspire empathy from people to volunteer & donate for the non-profit wing of Katha

- Keeping identity and brand value of all programmes (example: Katha Utsav) under Katha in sync with the bigger picture, yet with an individual style of their own

- Clean, yet fun content that is descriptive yet intriguing for audiences

The makers:

The website team comprised of an intern, a photographer, a developer, me and two coding students who were first generation learners at Katha's school in a slum in Govindpuri. We were later joined by two more designers who helped us in create interesting creatives.

We made all bigger and separate sites and blogs come together on Katha.org

We migrated from ilovereading.in to katha.org/kathautsav (a microsite) to maintain the 'katha' brand consistency, yet ensure Katha Utsav festival has a brand of its own

on the site.

What & How of the Execution

Like most older organisations, Katha has many smaller universes inside it. The workforce is made of grassroot community workers who work in delhi's slums and also of english-speaking literature & publishing folks who wrote & illustrate storybooks and manage things. Therefore, to bring the history + varied current audiences & represents everyone at Katha was a challenge that we had to overcome through our user experience design

How did we Manage the Project

- We found google excel sheets to be extremely helpful

- Adobe XD was the main platform that we designed the initial mockups on to share with Katha's leadership

1. Message mapping:

The first step was to ask key stakeholders what, why and how of Katha's organisational goals, their expectation from digital media and marketing and their view of the organisation's vision and mission.

The activity helped us get multiple sides of the Katha Story, and we imbibed it all in the content.

2. Aesthetics design:

Being a fun children's publication as well as a nonprofit with serious education goals- the challenge was to meet both needs.

- Photographs not just illustrations: The website's key focus is on photographs of children. We moved from illustrations heavy to photographs heavy design to communicate the 'realness' of the problem of non-literacy in India.

We decided to have photographs of children (especially girls) reading Katha books and expressing the joy, in order to communicate effectively that we are a nonprofit & a publishing house, working for the cause of children's reading.

- Playful yet serious fonts: Both Fjalla one and Catamaran used on the website are fonts with a huge variety in their font family and we could be both playful as well as serious with them together. Furthermore, 'Catamaran' was Founder Geeta Dharmarajan's favourite for what it stood for!

3. Call-to-action:

The main agenda of the website was to get in more enthusiastic & inspired volunteers, donors & partners apart from more sign ups for our Katha Utsav writers' workshop!

And hence, on every page we added four call to action for people to sign up immediately on.

Also we added a volunteer's map + a book donation map, for everyone to be able to use google map to directly go to the 65+ libraries we are operating in the under-served communities and spaces lent by people in RWAs etc.