Watching
where you click
The COVID-19 pandemic drove record numbers of users to CDC.gov. From January to May of 2020, the site saw a 2109% increase in page view. The urgency of the situation made user experience and data driven design more important than ever. The CDC UX team was able to experiment and iterate like never before.
Priority highlights
On the COVID-19 homepage, we used Adobe Activity Map to track clicks from both desktop and mobile users. We monitored trends daily and weekly.
Based on user searches, we added a “Highlights” box to the homepage. Click data was crucial for managing this box. By examining popular pages and search terms, we could identify what users wanted. I checked this against the click data to see if users could find the information on the homepage.
For increasingly popular topics, I compared them with existing links to decide what to replace. We updated the links frequently, sometimes daily, to keep the homepage fresh.
This was one of the fastest updates I had seen, as usually, multiple reviews were needed before content changes. The data allowed us to make quick decisions, improving access to information for users.
2020
Started with basic click data
2021
Added details about changes number of clicks overall
2022
Added details to better understand
Percentage of total clicks
Percentage for the previous week
Desktop vs. mobile
Additionally, monitoring both desktop and mobile activities helped me identify gaps for mobile users.
While desktop users were easily able to find a link to the COVID Data Tracker, significantly fewer mobile users clicked on the same links. In response, I recommended adding a COVID Data Tracker link to the highlights box just for mobile. This increased findability for mobile users.
