Interactive Atlas of Professions to attract students to in-demand digital professions

Our clients Sber and HSE University were launching an interactive website where students, schoolchildren and young professionals can study the in-demand professions of the future in 12 areas. There they can find career guidance, discover what suits them best, and receive profile training.

There already was a concept for the city of future professions, and it needed to become vibrant and interactive.

We anticipated possible scenarios of user behavior, and the partners from Tetraform design studio suggested several options for potential style, based on the customer’s references.

Each profession has its own cluster on the map. We set up simple navigation through additional pages. Prepared a universal template to quickly add new professions in the future.

To speed up the work, we used ready-made elements for architecture and city decor, then refined their appearance according to customer requirements. The streets were widened than in reality, to make it easier for users to separate clusters from one another.

Each cluster was assembled separately, then merged into the map and added details: people, transport, parks and road markings.

For each cluster we invented a metaphorical image, which was integrated into the landscape of the city and animated to bring it life. Now the Atlas is interesting to explore not only for practical benefit, but also out of curiosity.

After the tests, complex animations were abandoned in order not to overload the site and reduce its loading time. The final version of Atlas does not include these animations.

Our client Sber has a family of virtual assistants, ‘Salute', that help users on the websites, with services and products of the company. There were no plans to integrate them into Atlas, as it didn’t fit into the timeline. So we wrote a simple script ourselves for navigating and answering questions. This made Atlas even more ‘lifelike'.