You know your website is growing when you have to keep updating your Eco Counter!
One of my favourite features on our site is the Eco Counter (find it in the lower right hand side of our home page, and also in the side-bar on our partner pages), but it has taken us a while to refine this neat little feature.
The Eco Counter had been on the drawing board for a few months, as we knew we wanted to present our key metrics (mileage and potential co2 reduced) to our partners, but we weren’t quite sure how best to do this.
We put together the design and went for an odometer style look; this process was fairly straight-forward, everyone loved the look and the design was signed-off quickly.
We then built the working version in Flash, and this is when the serious iterations and rebuilds started happening. It was only once we started using the counter that we realised the need for changes.
- Our ERP lander width was changed to work with lower resolution screens, so we had to squeeze the eco counter to fit.
- We quickly realised that 4 digits were not going to be enough, so an extra digit was added.
- Then it was modified it to allow all text to be passed in as parameters for localization purposes, eliminating the need for the imperial/metric toggle. The Eco Counter is now aware of what locale it is in and will use the appropriate measures.
- Some other changes were made enabling us to switch-off the counter from the system.
- The Eco Counter then started getting popular and internal pressure was mounting to get it on the home page. As the numbers kept on rolling upwards, we added another digit.
- A timestamp was then added to the bottom of the counter to make it easier to check the data. This is also really handy for monitoring the launch of ERP landing pages, it’s fun sitting back and watching the the counter accelerating as events like Dave Matthews take place.
- Two more digits were added as we hit yet more milestones.
Of course, we could have spent more time initially writing a long functional spec to catch all of these issues before we started building, but I would argue that we have built a better, smarter feature a lot faster by forging ahead and using it in the wild.
We now have a very versatile feature that can work on our home page and partner pages, providing users with a more tangible and measurable reason to use our site. I can see this feature evolving further in the future so that we can all track our contribution to reducing co2 with PickupPal.
It’s also really encouraging to know that most of these changes are the result of our rapid growth and sign-up rate, with any luck the next challenge will be designing a counter with 9 digits.
- Jonathan