Chicago Park District Online Registration »

 

The Chicago Park District is charged with managing the largest park district in the United States, which includes over 220 facilities with 7,300 acres of parkland. The Park District also hosts thousands of special events, as well as sports and recreation programs, throughout the year.

Problem

The Chicago Park District needed to re-design its website to make park and program information easier to find and to make online registration and payment possible. It also had to accommodate an ever-growing list of events and programs, and the site traffic that accompanied registration periods.
Project goals:

  • Decrease the time taken to register
  • Increase ease of use
  • Decrease load times
  • Increase responsiveness
  • Increase number of purchases per order and number of orders
  • Decrease abandoned carts
  • Decrease bandwidth used per visitor
  • Increase capacity/scalability
  • Ability to identify popular programs in order to predict demand and plan

Solutions

We chose to recreate the online registration application program using AJAX. We also introduced a new layout and user flow. We created a “wish list” in order to allow the user to select the programs and save them before registration opened, therefore decreasing the load on their servers on registration day.
AJAX powered search tool:

  • Smaller pages
  • Faster page loads
  • Increased granularity of analytics to monitor “interestingness” or EOI
  • Break out cacheable content from dynamic content to increase response times and decree database hits
  • Support cacheable pagination
  • Improved user flow

AJAX powered wishlist:

  • Increased the amount of content cached on the server
  • Decreased the database hits and hence decreased response times
  • Decreased the time take to register
  • Create a pre-registration activity to encourage usage prior to the day of registration

Results

Of the more than 2,000 users who responded to a survey sent by Duo a week after registration opened, more than 60% found the experience better than past registrations and 84% found the system easy to use. An overwhelming 90% of respondents said they would use the online tool again.

Based on statistics generated through Urchin and the program database, Duo was able to determine that people were able to get through the site faster, add more items to their carts and complete their orders than in previous registrations. Registration opened at 9:00 a.m. on Feb. 20 and within one hour, more than 3,400 users purchased over 7,300 classes using this new application.

One of the key improvements made by the implementation of the browser tool gave patrons the ability to save items to a wish list prior to registration. Of the more than 6,400 orders placed, 37% were wish list orders.

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