A leading national chain of retail stores wanted to expand their presence in Bengaluru from 4 to 10 stores. The main challenge for them was to identify locations for these next set of stores such that the surrounding areas resemble the locations of their successful stores.

How India Lives was contacted to consult the retail chain on their expansion plans. The first step was to understand the profiles of the types of customers at their stores. We identified the typical purchasing habits and income levels of these customers and then mapped these traits to publicly available data using proxies. The list of proxies included diverse datapoints like asset ownership, income levels, savings levels and more. The proxies were chosen to specifically serve the industry the retailer was operating in. These metrics were then analysed with respect to the population density of the retailer’s customer profiles. The next step was to identify clusters of locations within Bengaluru’s 200 wards where these customers reside. Using advanced segmentation and clustering, we zeroed in on the locations that would serve the retailer’s expansion plans well.

One of India’s leading job portals, after completing 9 years of operations was sitting on a huge pile of data about how Indians’ search and apply for jobs. The challenge before them was to organise and make sense of the vast amount of data in a way that can help them improve their product offerings.

We identified the data to be used at two levels: the jobseeker (customer) and the job-posters (clients). We proposed and designed several ways in which the portal could leverage the power of their data to help both these sets of customers. Having structured their data, we proceeded to identify and answer questions like which sets of skills define a software developer’s career path in India? Using data, we built a product feature that would help the portal’s customers identify the point they were in a software developer’s career journey and which skill sets they needed to learn to advance their way forward. We scrapped job listings and applications across more than 20 of India’s cities, and using that, we layered the feature with projected incomes across each step of the career journey.

While the job portal already had an in-house data analytics team, they lacked the skills to layer and contextualise the data in a format that narrates a compelling story. The job portal incorporated the feature we built for them into their offering and added significant value for their customers.

Vidhi Centre of Legal Policy is a think-tank advocating for better laws and improved governance using legal research. As part of their ongoing research, they collected vast amounts of data on judicial vacancies using public resources and RTI requests. The challenge for them, was to bring all this unstructured data on one interface in an interactive visual form for their readers.

Judicial Vacancy

As part of the project, we designed the portal that would eventually house three interactives that serviced two objectives: give the reader a big picture view of the judicial vacancies in India, whilst letting her explore the finer details of every sitting judge in the country. We understood the potential that the data collected by Vidhi had, and accordingly, proposed features for the dashboard that enabled the readers to take away the maximum insights by slicing the data.

Judicial Budgets

Given the complexities of a dataset obtained through RTIs and government sources, we cleaned and structured the data to make it easy for the customer to update the portal in the future, iron out errors and irregularities, all while ensuring we leave the reader with maximum insights using just a few clicks. To further enable simplicity, we employed a host of measures – classified judge designations into fewer categories, mapped judicial districts to administrative districts, and made the data accessible for easy, future updates.

Gender Diversity

With an intuitive design, the visualisation enabled the reader to understand the state of judicial vacancies in the country at all the three levels – from the Supreme Court, to the High Courts in the states and down to the lower subordinate courts housed in all of India’s districts. Legal researchers can easily identify the districts that are understaffed with judges and require immediate intervention. With effective drill downs, the reader can explore the composition of the judges at a district level, understand how well- or under- represented women are in the judiciary, understand where each judge is recruited from, and much more. Lastly, it opened the vast dataset to the reader to enable her to search for any sitting judge in the country in any court and view all their details with just a few clicks.

We have designed reports, graphics, GIFs and other outputs for think-tanks, industry associations and corporates.

1. Tata Trusts: India Justice Report

2. IDFC Institute: Safety and crime survey, Affordable Housing Report

3. Centre for Budget Governance and Accountability (CBGA): Nutrition report working papers and policy briefs (with Unicef); School-education budgets (with CRY)

4. Just Actions: The Missing Piece, GIF on pneumonia deaths, GIF on funding for pneumonia R&D

Give us your research report in Microsoft Word and Excel formats, and we will turn this around into a well-designed PDF that is ready to be printed. Ours is an end-to-end service, anchored by a senior editorial person who coordinates with your researchers at one end and How India Lives designers on the other end. We will handle the entire report till the printing stage: creating tables, charts and infographics and proof-reading them; designing the entire report; typesetting the text; and handing over the final PDF and InDesign files to your printer.

Once you have visibility on a project, a senior editorial person will meet your project head and research team, understand the project and its framework from both editorial and design perspectives: things like research focus, report size, colors, look and feel, graphic sensibilities, visual treatment, timelines, etc. We promise a high level of continuous engagement. So, this editorial point-person will periodically share design templates and updates for your approval, and will always be available for discussion with your project staff.