Motivating more active journeys to school with Living Streets
How we helped Living Streets motivate thousands of school children to take more active journeys to school
Living Streets is a UK charity focused on achieving a better walking environment and inspiring people to walk more. As part of its Walk to School Challenge (one of the charity's flagship initiatives), they launched a Travel Tracker initiative to motivate (and track!) active school travel habits.
The original Travel Tracker tool was not coping well with the success of the initiative. Classroom users were experiencing problems with the site crashing or slowing down to such a degree that recording the journeys of 30 excited school children was becoming an impossible task.
The Travel Tracker tool is designed to help incentivise school children to take a more active journey to school. Children record how they get to school each day using an easy icon selector, and are awarded badges if they exceed a set threshold of active journeys.
The tool needed to ensure that during peak times, when schoolkids all over England, Scotland and Wales are logging in to record how they got to school, the system could load quickly and not only record all of those journeys, but also make complex calculations according to how many school days there are in that week, how many active journeys each child had made that week, and how engaged that entire class was that month.
We spent Discovery ensuring that we understood the needs of the different user groups, from school teachers to children to local authorities. We mocked up data to test how we would ensure that our rebuild could withstand the unusual traffic patterns and demands, using exciting tools that let you hammer servers with traffic - it’s impossible to have a bad day in the office when you get to use sites called Bees With Machine Guns!
The key part of the brief was of course to handle the traffic. However, it was also a great opportunity for the Living Streets team to get improvements made to the site along the way, building a new registration system, global tags and data visualisation tools.
The new tool launched in August in time for schools returning from their summer holidays. Since then, the Tracker has reached up to 140,000 registrations a day - an increase of 100%!
