Experience Day Maps

Regular visitors will know that we've been gradually integrating geographic data into our databases for some time now. In fact if you were on the site about 2 weeks ago at around 2 in the morning you might have noticed us doing live trials of the prototype! Well it's finally time to come clean, so to speak, so here's a brief outline of what we've been up to:

• Some months ago, we realised that there was a minority of searchers (maybe 10%) who were including geographic information in their web searches (e.g. 'SPACE HOPPER EXPERIENCE DAY BOGNOR'). We realised that we were not serving these users particularly well and that other users might appreciate more information on where the experience days are taking place before they clicked on the title links and drilled down into the detailed descriptions on the merchant sites. Following a lively extended coffee break discussion, we started seriously scratching our heads to see how we could improve our service.
• To do anything at all we needed geographic data so the first challenge was organising the data collection and processing from the merchants. This was completed a couple of months ago and saw the launch of our Counties and Regions menu item and pages for each of these, as the quality of information at this stage was good enough to support this level of detail but nothing further.
• The second step was reprocessing this data to do what we could to make the data consistent across the merchants. This was not all that easy as different merchants use different descriptions. For example, driving experience days at Mallory Park Circuit are listed by one merchant as happening at Mallory Park, by another as at Kirby Mallory (the nearest village) and by a third as happening at Hinckley (the nearest small town).
• Having organised the data how we wanted it, the third step was finding a good way of presenting this data to you guys in such a way that you could do something useful with it like select particular venues or look at the distances to different venues from your home. We experimented with our own mapping system and also with what is technically known as a 'Google Maps Mashup' and we finally decided on this latter route. Since we are using a Google Maps mashup, our user interface will be similar to Google Earth and Google Maps (e.g. mouse scroll wheel zooms in and out) so using the maps should be familiar to some of our users and for others, at least we are asking them to do something that is a transferrable skill for the future rather than asking them to use controls that they will never encounter again.

The team here is thrilled with how this map has been working over the last couple of weeks so tonight we are finally making it live. Using the maps (which are on ALL our themed pages) you can now zoom and pan with experience day venues highlighted by bright green markers. You can even stick a red drawing pin in the map to add a 'home' location and the tables then show a 'distance' column indicating how far it is to the nearest venue for each experience day in the table.

We hope you find this new facility useful and we will be watching closely to see if it increases engagement with the site (is easy to use and worth using) or decreases it (is just a bit too complicated and puts some users off). Hopefully if will be the former but as we've learned over the last few years, whenever you add a new feature you add complexity and this can be perilous!

Obviously we hope you will all think the new Experience Day Maps are as great as we do but, as always, all and any feedback is welcome and Richard will be thrilled to hear from you at richard-at-findexperiencedays-dot-com.

Monday November 09, 2009 | The Blogging Team | News