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By weekbeforenext on
The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) is a confederation of the research arms of 13 Federal departments and agencies, which carry out research and develop and maintain capabilities that support the Nation’s response to global change. USGCRP has a legal mandate to conduct a National Climate Assessment every four years.
The National Climate Assessment summarizes the impacts of climate change on the United States, now and in the future. A team of more than 300 experts guided by a 60-member Federal Advisory Committee produced the report, which was extensively reviewed by the public and experts, including federal agencies and a panel of the National Academy of Sciences.
Why Drupal was chosen:
- Familiar with Drupal
- Access to core and contributed modules
- Strong Drupal development community
- Flexible, extendible, scalable content management system
- Themable design
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Requirements
- The entire 1400 page report and background data needed to be visualized.
- All elements of the site (graphics, text, photos) needed to be shareable as separate items.
- The entire system needed to be responsive and accessible across browsers and devices.
- The design needed to cater to both the general public and scientists.
Goals
- Innovative Design Strategy: Based on several storytelling principles, “Snowfall” design, a first for a large-scale government science report.
- Mobile First: The site was designed to be completely responsive to function across all devices, including smart phones, tablets, and computers.
- Social Media Integration: Every piece of content in the report has its own URL, Facebook and Twitter handle so that information can be extracted and shared on social media, email or list-serves.
Outcomes
- White House Launch - May 6, 2014
- “I want to thank the web development team for building the dynamite website that goes along with this report. Who says we can’t build a great website in the White House?” – John Podesta, Counselor to President Obama
- Launch Day Statistics
- 137,700 unique users visited
- 1/3 of traffic from referral sites including nytimes.com, whitehouse.gov, foxnews.com, and slate.com
- 39,000 sessions from Social media; primarily from Facebook and Twitter
- The average session duration was 2:40
- 1/5 of visitors were on mobile
- Bounce rate of 40%
- 6,000 images were downloaded
- 1,500 report related PDFs were downloaded
- Media Reaction
- “The result is a lot more engaging than a PDF file or a stack of papers. Yes, it's still a lot of content to digest, but if the government (or, really, any organization) wants people to actually read the reports it puts out, this could be a good way to prevent people from having their eyes instantly glaze over.” - Keith Wagstaff, NBC News
- Social Media Reaction
- "The site for the National Climate Assessment is up, with a powerful message wrapped in a striking responsive design..." - @RWD
- "For those who doubted government's design ability after Obamacare site, just take a look at the Climate Assessment..." - @ARStrasser
- "Yet another Fed Gov win for Drupal as the White House launches 'National Climate Assessment'..." - @dougvann
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Bibliography
References were managed in Endnote and the authors wrote the assessment in Word. The references were exported from Endnote and then imported into Drupal using the Bibliography module. Reference citations were added to the Word documents, inserting a unique identifier inside tags. Content was moved from the Word documents to Drupal with citation tags intact. A custom input filter was created to swap out the tags with the reference based on the unique identifier. Tooltips were created by the Bigfoot jQuery plugin.
Entity reference
Pages were built by stacking pieces of content in a particular order. This content was referenced by the page through the entity reference field. Theme templates controlled design based on the entity reference field and the content type. Each piece of content was shareable with an anchor link, taking users directly to a particular place in the page.
File Force Download
File Force Download provided a quick and easy way to force PDF links to download files.
Search API
Search API allowed for the control of indexing. This site was also indexed in Apache Solr for a global search on the main site. Search views allowed the search result page to be a view, allowing more design and functionality control. The views filters were consolidated so that regions, sectors and response strategies showed results from bot the highlights and full report. The main search view was duplicated to restrict the results by content type to only show Graphics. Theme templates were used to control design and color of search results.
Views Infinite Scroll
Views Infinite Scroll provided a quick and easy way to make the search results page automatically reveal more results as the user reached the end of the page.
Menu token
Menu token allowed the use of non page links for menu items. This was useful in linking menu items to anchors in the page.
Community contributions:
Node Asset module sandbox project
The Asset module was reengineered to use nodes instead of asset entities. This was to allow content to stand alone, with auto node title and pathauto properties, and be embedded into other content for increased flexibility. Figures, interactive figures, key messages, photos, tables, etc. could be embedded directly in content with a consistent design. If content appeared in multiple places, it could be edited in the node and the change would appear in every place. Theme templates determined the design of content types by display mode and were easily accessible to the designers. An additional Node Asset Index module was included for creating an index of node assets, identifying where node assets have been placed and providing that information for the creation of breadcrumb links.
Team members:
Project team:
Habitat Seven, Design
NOAA - National Climate Assessment Technical Support Unit, Development
Forum One, Hosting
Sectors:
Government
