Context

As society mobilizes around climate imperatives, companies are making sustainability investments and reporting-out to employees, customers, partners, and the general public to share the successes of initiatives, and what the future holds. Offering perspective, data, and stories to the right audiences at the right level is one of the biggest challenges facing brands that are investing in broad sustainability programs. Audiences value sustainability reports for the vital information they provide, but determining the appropriate altitude of shared information and selecting the optimal formats for delivering it can be challenging.

Challenge

How to distill Amazon’s annual sustainability report in a way that engages wider audiences.

Amazon’s global sustainability team asked Formative to reimagine its annual sustainability report beyond a downloadable PDF (a 100+ page document) into supplemental content that was exciting, forward-thinking, and interesting to a broad audience. This content covered annual progress across a breadth and depth of topics such as packaging, waste, water, supply chain, transportation, and human rights, among others. The downloadable report PDF was an incredible and thorough resource for each of these topics, however it was intentionally created for a bespoke industry audience. The report’s density and length were barriers for other potential audience groups including customers and employees.

Solutions

Producing a report-inspired digital experience, we engaged a much wider audience set, and provided content at-their-interest-level, which could be digested regardless of sustainability background or education.

The digital experience encouraged readers to explore the stories and progress of Amazon’s sustainability programs – highlighting results, breadth of involvement, and next steps. Inspired by the report, our approach emphasized connected storytelling that guided users through Amazon’s key themes.

1. Develop a visually stunning, highly-accessible interface.

Problem
Solve for data overload by offering a more approachable perspective on sustainability work.

Solution
We developed a visually-compelling, simple, user-friendly UI - punctuated by callouts and tabs that invite users to interact with and examine the data. Although building an immersive online environment encourages exploration, project risks include trying to be too clever in UX/UI design to a point where people don’t know where to look, what to click on, what action to take. To guide users to scroll more slowly, read more thoughtfully, and watch more attentively, we made wise use of animation, video, interactive modules, and other navigation waypoints.

2. Optimize for performance and elevate audience engagement.

Problem
We were tasked with increasing dwell time, for audiences that are not always captivated by sustainability data.

Solution
The digital experience enabled users to dive into Amazon content at their desired level of interest. For some, that meant going deep and transitioning into the sustainability report .pdf itself. For others, it meant making quick-hit storylines and metrics available on the digital experience, since we knew we’d only have them for a short time. To reflect the priorities for the latter group, we identified easy-to-understand narratives across various topic areas in the report, and provided the right content to provide context. With these engagement narratives present, we were able to see the associated performance that comes with audiences spending more time – a natural result of solid UX and solid storytelling.

3. Be agile.

Problem
Our remit from the Amazon team was to deliver this experience at report launch, knowing that content would be in editing and approval cycles almost up to the launch window.

Solution
Work for the development stage took place as we simultaneously secured access to all platforms, tested the environment for bugs, and identified how to elevate Amazon’s existing sustainability website infrastructure. Development then moved into full gear, as we prepared storyboards, approved visual designs, and moved the process through QA and launch.