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This is a report I prepared about the user testing, redesign, traffic, and usage stats for www.chicagoearlylearning.org. Lots of details-- good info for developers, project managers, and people interested in stats on civic innovation projects.
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Chicago Early Childhood Portal Project Review Smart Chicago Collaborative October 2, 2013 Executive Summary Chicago Early Learning, www.chicagoearlylearning.org, is the City of Chicago's Early Learning Portal, where residents can easily find and compare early learning programs side-‐by-‐side. The site was recently re-‐launched after some significant effort:
• Extensive user testing with Chicago residents all over the city • Development of a new website that incorporated all of this feedback • Creation of an admin tool that allows for the maintenance of the data through
time • Generation of significant and site traffic on mobile, web, and text platforms
Following is a deep dive into the new features and current statistics related to our website. Formal and Informal Testing We did something rare in this project: we launched a pilot website in a very tight timeframe last year and then made it better. We actively listened to regular Chicago residents, dutifully noted their feedback, and directly changed an existing, working app so that it worked better for our target audience.
We showed the site on a typical computer set up inside a Chicago Public School location.
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We demonstrated the site at a CPS Head Start Policy Committee Meeting At Zenos Colman Elementary School, 4650 S. Dearborn.
We presented the site to block club leaders inside the ward office of as 37th Ward Alderman Emma Mitts.
We also tested the site in formal environments inside Action for Children locations in Chicago.
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Review of site features of the new website Design We completely overhauled the look & feel of the site, making it softer and more rounded. We moved from book imagery to a crayon/ marker in the logo, and removed the map-‐based homepage to provide more information about what the site does and how to use it.
There are a number of features of the site that we’d like to call out: Mobile Just like before, the site uses responsive design, which means that it looks great and works great on any device, reformatting the content automatically. Here’s the homepage at phone-‐size (at right). Notice that instead of showing words in the nav, it collapses into icons. Text We maintained the text feature, which was widely loved by residents in testing. We made the text phone number easier to see and share by giving it a separate page with a separate URL. The feature allows users to text a zip code to the number and receive back a list of nine locations in that area.
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Improved search We saw that many people started off their search with a location in mind, whether it was a school or a neighborhood. We moved away from a pure address search and now pre-‐populate the search box as the user types. This short-‐circuits the search process and makes people immediately feel like this is a place that has what they’re looking for. The “Browse by community” function provides another way for people to dive in without putting in an exact address.
Improved filtering We found in testing that people did not know how to easily drill down into search results and they very rarely used the filtering feature. We made the filtering more prominent and took up much more screen real estate with details of the search results. Previously, the user had to click on a particular item on the map to reveal details. An overall insight we observed from testing was that the map is not the thing—the details of early learning centers was the thing. We changed the interface to reflect this. Better comparisons One thing we heard loud and clear from parents was that they wanted to be able to compare more than two locations. In response, we completely changed the comparison system—changing it to a more recognizable star / favorite system, displaying starred items in a grid, and giving the user the flexibility to easily add and remove locations.
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Admin tool An important milestone in this reporting period is the creation of an easy-‐to-‐use admin tool to manage all of the locations. Previously, the site was run by a “magic spreadsheet” that was difficult to manage.
The admin search tool allows you to drill down quickly:
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And location detail pages are managed through a simple web form:
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Site usage statistics Overall site traffic is stable and growing with very little promotion
17,437 people visited the site since December 1, 2012. 26% of visitors are return visitors, which is healthy for a site of this kind, as a resource that people need to come back to as they are managing their decisions. Other good indicators are a relatively low 9.8% bounce rate (meaning that more than 90% of the people who arrive at the site perform a search) and twice as many page views as visits (again, an indication of people performing searches). The average visit duration of 4:45 is also promising. That aligns well with the our tests, which indicated this is about the right amount of time to have a search/ review/ print/ share experience on the site. Text usage is solid—17% of visits include querying the site via text To date, 4,069 text messages have been received and 9,200 text messages were sent back in response through this service. With 23,534 visits, that means people used the text function 17% of the time. Considering the context switching (changing devices from desktop to smartphone; moving from browser to phone apps on a smartphone), this shows the popularity of the feature.
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Mobile usage is significant—23% of all visits A full 23% of visits to the site were on mobile devices, with Apple devices accounting for 58% of the visits (3,157 of 5,426) and various Android devices taking up the bulk of the rest of the views in data from December 1, 2012 to September 24, 2013. We were surprised to see firsthand the myriad types of devices running Android—there were 63 different device types that accounted for 10 or more visits. This number is on-‐target for average mobile usage for a website in the United States. By comparison, here’s mobile usage on other sites we run at Smart Chicago: 34% for Connect Chicago (where people are actively searching for a public computer center), 26% for the CUTGroup (where location is not relevant to the site content), and 19% for the Smart Chicago website (which is a content-‐driven website with no particular mobile context), and 16% for Chicago Health Atlas (where the main activity is comparing neighborhoods).
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If you’d like to be able to log in to view the traffic stats on a regular basis, just send me an email at [email protected] with a Gmail address and I will add you to the dashboard.