Bringing succession planning to life for Withers

Turning legal expertise into an interactive story

We kicked things off with a collaborative workshop, bringing our design, motion and activation specialists together with the Withers team to align on the audience, creative direction and mechanics.

Taking Withers' initial scenario concepts, character profiles, and scoring criteria, we transformed a series of succession-planning questions into a connected narrative. Every decision dynamically affected the user’s standing across three core measures:

• Wealth
• Reputation
• Family cohesion

That structure made a point that plain text never could: succession planning rarely hands you a clean, consequence-free choice. Protecting family wealth might damage public standing, while safeguarding reputation might place family unity under severe strain.

Storyboarding an unfolding family drama

With the framework locked in, we moved straight into storyboarding each scenario as part of a continuous arc.

Instead of presenting users with isolated, clinical questions, every scene moved the overarching story forward. An illness exposes structural gaps in the family plan. Personal choices create immediate reputational threats. Decisions about the business force a direct conflict between financial growth and family harmony.

We wove recurring details throughout the narrative to reward attentive users. A sealed envelope belonging to the family matriarch appears quietly across multiple scenes before its contents are revealed at the end, while recurring characters give the experience a real sense of depth and momentum.

Creating an illustrated world users could invest in

The visual approach was central to making this feel like an unfolding drama rather than a glorified quiz.

We first produced initial line sketches for every scene to lock down composition, character dynamics, and framing.. Then, we developed each scene into a rich, full-colour illustration. 

We kept character treatments, palettes, and lighting strictly consistent across all eight scenarios, striking a tone that felt sophisticated, polished, and appropriate for the intended audience.

Using motion to drive the narrative forward

Motion was designed to support the narrative and build tension throughout. Our motion design team storyboarded every scene individually, establishing how illustrations would be introduced, and which elements would remain active while the user weighed up their choice. Subtle idle movement kept scenes feeling alive without distracting from the task at hand.

Crucially, these movements often foreshadow what happens next, such as a phone receiving multiple notifications right before a reputational crisis hits in the following scenario.

Engineering a seamless, high-quality digital experience

Bringing an eight-scenario illustrated world to the browser required tight technical execution to balance rich visual fidelity with smooth, lag-free performance.

To render nearly 100 responsive image assets across desktop and mobile, our developers implemented a strict AVIF compression pipeline to protect page speed and by extension the overall user experience, without compromising visual quality.

To bring scene transitions to life, they engineered a custom 20-frame image sequence mask that paints full-colour artwork over underlying linework in real time, backed by dynamic scoring logic that maps user choices to eight distinct outcomes.

Creating a route from engagement to conversion

The activation was crafted to convert from the ground up. Upon completing the experience, users received personalised diagnostic feedback based on their choices, before being guided directly into a subscription form for legal alerts and events.

To ensure every choice delivered measurable commercial value, we built full event tracking across every branch of the journey. This gave Withers complete visibility into how audiences navigated each legal scenario, providing their team clear data to refine future content and campaigns.