ageingonthemove

Microsite for the Report: A dignity claim: Ageing on the move

What's a microsite and when to use it?

A microsite is a single web-page or a small cluster of web pages that exist separate from the organization main website and is used for specific campaign. To this rgard a microsite can have its own domain or unique URL and a different and distinctive branding. Microsite can typically be built to highlight content from joint study and research process, following a data collection exercise.

Using a reproducible analysis approach, the following workflow can be used:

After data collection in kobotoolbox and one data has been deposited and documented on RIDL, an initial data crunching report can be generated. This can be done with koboloadeR. Ideally both the data crunching notebook source (i.e Rmd file) and output (i.e. html, docx or pptx) should also be recorded in RIDL.
The Data analysis expert should then select from within the initial crunching report, the specific figures/charts that are more likely to generate interesting joint data interpretation and compile a new refined & smaller notebook to output some joint data interpretation presentation material. The content of the notebook should take in consideration the data literacy levels of the participants to the data interpretation sessions.
Joint data interpretation sessions are key to establish common understanding, compensate lack of evidence with expert judgment, resolve inconsistencies in the data, agree on priorities and develop likely scenarios/programmatic recommendations. All steps are well explained in this video from IFRC. The output of the session are data interpretation notes that can be included back in the notebook used to create the initial presentation and archived in UNHCR Internal Analysis repo. A last round of comments, regional peer review and validation than can be organized directly through the UNHCR Internal Analysis repo
The last step is to produce depending on the context, only a short microsite or a short microsite plus a more in-depth report. For in-depth report, UNHCR Analyst can use the paginated template from unhcRstyle package.

Why a re-usable microsite template?

This repository can be used as a template to generate microsite. The aim is to reproduce the look-and-feel from other UNHCR microsites like:

Desperate journeys
Families on the run
Her Turn
Stepping Up
Home Visit Report

The report generated through this repository is available here: A dignity claim: Ageing on the move.

Functional requirement for a microsite template

In order to ease the development of microsite, making a re-usable template is the initial requirement. Such template is expected to address the following functional requirements;

The template should use a basic and easy to learn markdown syntax allowing users to avoid coding any additional html/css/javascript.
The template should allow to integrate with Rmd template would facilitate the full integration of reproducible analysis and the generation of charts following UNHCR brand and as implemented in the unhcRstyle package.
The resulting microsite should be fully responsive (aka works on smartphone, tablet, laptop and desktop with various screen size).
The template should include different ways to highlight contents (boxes, side note), include sufficient social sharing capacity (posting on facebook or twitter) and include parallax scrolling effects with picture to better separate the content
The template should be independent from any Content Management System (CMS) and work with a Website Building script transforming the initial markdown file into static html site. The website building script should be open source in order to allow for the microsite to be developed collaboratively through a github repository.
The template should integrate with standard UNHCR SEO/UX/tracking features

Current template prototype

The template presented in this repository is based customized version of the distill package with allows to generate Statis html stie through built-in building capacity in [Rstudio](. A good overview of website creation with distill is here: https://rstudio4edu.github.io/rstudio4edu-book/make-distill.html and here https://themockup.blog/posts/2020-08-01-building-a-blog-with-distill/ - If you are not yet familiar with git, check this intro: https://happygitwithr.com/

At this stage, the template still have issues that remain to be fixed:

Parallax images not working well on certain smartphone models (Iphone) - see ticket.
Hamburger menu icon on mobile is very small, toggles out incorrectly and the logos disappear - see ticket on site navigation.
GTM and Google Analytics code snippets do not integrate well in the template. Need to test this integration
The social sharing script are not perfectly integrated See instruction to test here.
Images lazyloading is not integrated see potential with lazyrmd - see ticket
Some unnecessary font (FontAwesome) and library (AutoComplete) are loaded by default.

Markdown syntax

Markdown is a lightweight and easy-to-use syntax for styling your writing. You can use directly when creating the working version of the microsite content in word.

It includes conventions for

Syntax highlighted code block

# Header 1
## Header 2
### Header 3

- Bulleted
- List

1. Numbered
2. List

**Bold** and _Italic_ and `Code` text

[Link](url) and ![Image](src)

For more details see GitHub Flavored Markdown.

“Content is King”

Reduce cognitive load

The term cognitive load refers to the amount of working memory resources used to process a piece of information. The better designed is a message the more chances, people will retain it. In order to do that:

Highlight the main call to action in the microsite subtitle
Start with the main recommendations to ensure the readers does not need to wait 10 minutes of reading to find out what the report message is... if not, drop out risk are high....
Aim to be minimalistic: The ideal length of an article should be between 1500 and 2500 characters, taking an average 7 minutes to read.
Have a 2 or 3 main top level chapters max - avoid presenting content in too many chapter to minimize the cognitive cost for reader to absorb the content.
Minimize overwhelming effects by avoiding putting too many numbers to avoid psychic numbing
Do implement story telling techniques - A good data story is a way to communicate valuable insights and assign meaning and context to data that otherwise lives as numbers in an Excel spreadsheet. The narrative shall have a hook, momentum, or a captivating purpose. Finding such narrative structure is therefore a prerequisite. Such stories can be categorized according to the four main narrative frames below, each of them being linked to programs design or implementation. The presented data shall reflect the operation context to reinforce what readers knows or to reveal what they don’t:
1. shed light on a previously unexplored topic (it teaches people something new or they have not heard before),
2. introduce an interesting angle (gives them a new perspective)
3. provide useful suggestions to solve a problem (inspires to act)
4. disprove a hypothesis / debunk a widely held belief in terms of programmatic assumption.
Be persuasive for instance by shaping your narrative with the aforsest techniques: A - Alliteration. F - Facts. O - Opinions. R - Rhetorical questions. E - Emotive language. S - Statistics. T - (Three) rule of.

Highlight Content to ease "active reading"

"Active reading" techniques are used by many professionals and consist in , before reading the article content, looking at ad scanning any titles, subheadings, charts, graphs, and captions to get the key messages.

Those techniques allow to get the main messages of any document without reading it line by line... it is used in most medias nowadays

1. Paragraph Titles as statement

Title should be turned into meaningful statement/ summary - rather than referencing the topic explained in the chapter text