Childstats.gov

Childstats starts with the Forum, a collection of 23 Federal government agencies involved in research and activities related to children and families. Founded in 1994, the mission of the Forum is to foster coordination and collaboration, and to enhance and improve consistency in the collection and reporting of federal data on children and families.

The Forum's hallmark report is titled America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, and provides the public with a summary of national indicators of child well-being in an easy-to-use, non-technical format.

The Forum initially released this report in print format only, eventually finding a home online in 1998. The original website hosted a PDF version of the report along with links to related materials.

In 2006 the Forum began developing the first complete digital versions of the report with incremental updates for several years. They eventually partnered with NCES and IES who would end up performing all development work on the report with the Forum providing all. A more significant redesign occurred in 2008 and that version remained mostly unchanged until we begun work on a massive overhaul in 2023.

The Challenges

  • The site suffered from readability issues due to text density, caused by the wide content buckets combined with small font sizes

  • While having inset figures was a good choice to break up the text content, the narrow font used for labels and embedded text content made them both difficult to read and cause potential accessibility issues

  • Choosing photography for indicators with a negative connotation was challenging as you did not want to connect any particular population group to said indicator

  • Childstats was never developed with mobile devices in mind, and without a responsive layout was difficult for users to navigate on phones and other non-desktop devices

  • Most users felt that the digital version was just a carbon copy of the PDF content without any value adds, missing an opportunity to find further methods to improve the user experience

The Results

  • The homepage now directs users to immediate topic areas of interest via a series of simple icons. These serve as a replacement to photographs avoiding the need to make any decisions about sensitive topic areas

  • The original branding has been replaced with a new logo type, contemporary and clear to read with the new orange color associated with points of interest across the site

  • The right column features a prominent call to action prompting the user to interact with the Data User Survey, which helps drive futures directions taken by the Forum

  • Interior pages now have a sticky navigation to allow users to move within the site on longer indicators without having to hunt for controls

  • The entire site now has a responsive layout utilizing the simple CSS Flex based system used with IES/NCES websites

  • Two layouts were produced to facilitate an easy change between the standard Childstats release and the special edition years with unique indicators

  • The figure formatting has be revamped with the help of content providers and are now more colorful and easier to comprehend, are in a scalable file format that can expanded with no quality loss, and now have a lightbox functionality to zoom in on each figure as the user needs

Some Missed Opportunities

  • Our small team was not able to tackle the styling and layouts of the raw tabular data released with the report beyond a quick typography pass, and should we have the opportunity in the future we will likely leverage some lessons learned from other recent IES/NCES projects

  • The Forum had discussed with us fleshing out the “At a Glance” section with different types of data including visualizations, but that fell outside of the scope of the work being done