Project Summary
Challange
NORAD wanted to increase engagement and website traffic during the non-peak times in December while the website is live.
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Solution
- Product Management and Partner Coordination: Drive Product and Execute with the partners associated with the Santa tracking experience
- Visual Brand: Create a new visual brand and interactive experience
- Create Personality a.k.a. Elves: Develop characters and world building
- Social Media Engagement: Explore new paths to drive traffic to the website and mobile apps
WebsiteApproach
Challenge 1: Product Management and Creative Leadership
Santa Claus is Coming to Town
3 months to deliver value within a short planning and roll out window.
In addition to my own design tasks, and later front end development work on the website, I also coordinate receiving or delivering content from NORAD and the various other partners who we worked with.
- Games Partner
- Santa Tracker (Map integration) Partner
- Copy Translation Partner
- 3D Santa and Reindeer Modeling Partner
- Mobile App Development Partner
- My colleagues and myself (creative direction, design systems and branding, Azure hosting, and web development)
Challenge 2: Increasing Engagement in December
NORAD's Goals
From that accidental phone call by a child in 1955 due to a misprinted phone number in a Sears catalog to today’s digital experience NORAD loves to engage the public about its mission and tracking Santa plays an important part of it.
"A large part of the public’s perception seems to derive from the mountain featured in the movie War Games."
However, there was frustration with how to best achieve this goal of educating the public about NORAD’s purpose with the Santa Tracker. The existing website analytics and public feedback showed that the audience did not visit the website until 24 December and only a miniscule of users who visited explored the website beyond the “Track Santa..” link. Most people thought NORAD was just the mountain featured in War Games.
The website accounted for 90% of NORAD Santa Trackers yearly visitors the year we took over the project
The current website wasn't optimized to attract visitors especially children to explore and satisfy their natural curiosity. This is where we would begin our journey of discovery and creation to bring the Santa Tracker website to the next level first.
Year 1: What Do Children "Want?" and What Do Their Guardians Want?
a.k.a. How I was Wrong
This is a little tale of how research matters. As my colleagues and I got down to it we knew roughly the design approach we wanted to take. We began with the assumption of an 8-10 year old demographic in mind. Wow, was I wrong.
Research with parents and children resulted in discovering I targeted the wrong age group. Instead of 8-10 year olds being the age group, it was children 3-5 years.
Fortunately, this discovery came up during the recruitment process through our screener questions, though the credit lies with the Santa Tracker being a well-known commodity.
Research With Kids Through Observation, Interviews, and Play
We invited children and their guardians into the studio to learn more about their digital and social behaviors, preferences, and the adult's actions and concerns.
Observation Methodology
We brought children and their guardians into a room with a couch and observed the children's behavior on an iPad or Computer (their choice) primed with age focused popular digital website brands.
Observation Process
- Prompt the child with the guardians help.
- We took notes from the observations and logged into a spreadsheet
- What grabs the child's attention?
- How long does the child interact with the digital brand?
- Where does the child explore?
- Does the child ask for help?
Interview Methodology
I asked general questions to the child and to the guardian around digital life, sibling life, interests, and thoughts about Santa Claus and Christmas if relevant. In our screener we tried to recruit families who tracked Santa or celebrated Christmas.
Interview Process
- Created baseline interview questions for the study
- Observers took notes from the interviews and we grouped answers and observations into an affinity board
- What is your favorite cartoon character, why do you like them?
- What is your favorite activity on the "brand" website/app?
- What circumstances is the child allowed to use a device?
- Does the child ask for help?
- Does the child use a device with siblings or you?
- What does the child do on NORAD Tracks Santa and for how long?
UX Thought: Kids Make For Memorable Participants
Insight 1
Children naturally understand technology, but get frustrated and fatigue easily.
Insight 2
Children are attracted to familiar pop culture characters, but will respond positivily to cute, silly, funny characters that may not be familiar name brands.
Insight 3
Children are honest, they will tell us what they don't like.
Insight 4
Children expect immediate feedback when they make an action. Colors and noise is a must.
Insight 5
While guardians often don't like to engage with their children on the device. They are in favor if an older sibling will engage with the young child on the device, provided it doesn't lead to disagreements amoungst the children.
Who Tracks Santa?
NORAD was amused and surprised with the age demographic findings from our report. We created some personas that we shared out to all the partners as part of the research deliverable report. Sophia and Oliver became the two primary audience members we were going to target our experience for. Lily represented an older sibling and Sydney represented the guardian persona. We used the personas as a guide when reflecting on design decisions and adhering to U.S. COPPA guidelines.
How Do They TRACK Santa?
These initial studies helped us collaborate the site analytics about devices and helped identify a few key scenarios how children could possibly engage with the Santa Tracker.
- Children alone on a device at home
- Children with sibling or parent on a device at home
- Children with a device in transit not at home
We discussed our personas with NORAD to set a clear picture of who is engaging and how they are engaging. This guided our objectives on reducing and simplifying the amount of content and improve presentation.
It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
While we were conducting research, we began thinking about how we would organize the new website content. Drawing on my previous experience designing kiosks for the Children's Museum of Houston, some background in instructional design and influenced by Debra Gelman and her fantastic book; Design for Kids We were going to bring lots of sound efx, animation, and present small blocks of content in a show don't tell format, well eventually.
With the timeline of about a month and a half to design the new website and available designer resources we could not possibly rebrand and restructure the entire user experience vision all in one season. The team agreed to prioritize improving the website information architecture and set a visual style and language we could build on. The experience would follow best practices for designing for young children and would scale easily to an iPad and Surface landscape form factor. Finally, we wanted to make a great impression, so we would have the opportunity to work on this again the following year.
Year 1 Design
The wireframes and storyboards drawn by my colleague Abigail incorporated a globe filled with interactive Christmas objects that the audience could select to explore different sections of the website. This was also touch friendly for iPad and Surface users.
This design was implemented within 4 weeks and shipped and we were invited back to work on the project the next year. Unfortunately I don't have the visual designs for this version.
Year 2: Into the Parallax
With a new year and feedback from NORAD concerning that a North Pole village in some form was something that had been used in previous versions of the website and they wanted to make that more focused going forward.
- New visual design and Parallax website
- First usability test
In the creative discussions we decided to build off the globe and start the experience from Outer Space and as the user interacts the animation will zoom into Inner Space and then ending on a North Pole village. Within each of these scenes we could integrate animated satellites and jet fighters as well. I took some inspiration by “the Simpsons” opening credits where the town of Springfield comes into view through the clouds and decided to take this a step further and sketched out a new design.
Parallax Website 1st Version
To make the interaction between the sections more engaging; we decided that the website would follow the Parallax model and would use 3D art objects. Digital Kitchen came on as a partner and helped to provide the initial visual 3D modeling of the various sections for us. They suggested a Claymation modeling aesthetic in the style of classic children's Christmas cartoons like the 1964 Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Usability Testing
We also conducted usability testing on this new 3D and parallax based website design to gather feedback and test our design assumptions to make improvements for the next year. From a research session with regards to the 3D modeled fighter jets accompanying Santa, one child asked his guardian if we were going to shoot down Santa Claus?
“Mama are they going to shoot down Santa Claus?”
This quote became a sort of a creative ruler to measure against, all design decisions we made going forward would result in reflecting on this question, does this reenforce the notion that we might be making violence against Sanata Claus?
Challange 3: Increasing Engagement With the Content
Year 3: The Elf Who Dreamed to be a Dentist
In the third year, I had quite a list of ideas and features I wanted to achieve, but fate would rain down in the form of business pragmatism, though also rainbows are created as the sun appears. In short, I needed to free the team for other client projects, but in negotiations with leadership, Israel. a newly hired designer who had 3d skills joined with me to work on the next iterations. This left the two of us to design and develop further interations and features of the website.
- Expand the Parallax
- Elves Everywhere
- Social Media Engagement
- Responsive Design and Native Mobile
- Iterating on the Library and NORAD HQ
We made a bigger impact in the third year despite less resources. I attribute this to the amazing work the team did in year 2 setting up a solid foundation particualry with the front end coding and animation of the website.
Expanding the Parallax
Considering the user feedback and our desire to focus more on the content and accessibility, we made additions to the original main screen sections and added a footer.
Outer Space Iterations
- Changed the main text navigation to images. Small children do not or cannot read and they respond better to images and symbols.
- Although we made the globe spin so you could see every continent, no one really discovered this, but they would tap on it. We moved the “Let's Go” CTA onto the globe.
- Redesigned the globe to include missing land masses like the United Kingdom, and more accurately shape the other continents to not offend sensibilities.
- Added music and a music player at the request of NORAD.
- Moved the social media navigation and added new channels (more info in the social media section).
- Added more animations to make the website more interesting.
- Made the navigation and heads up display content change color depending on the background to improve readability and contrast.
We didn't make any changes to the Inner Space section.
At the request of NORAD they requested we bring more attention to the NORAD HQ content.
North Pole Village Iterations
- Updated buildings in the village including the NORAD HG building inspired by the actual building in Colorado Springs. Also we added a village Maibaum (Maypole).
- Animated the arrows above the buildings and added content describing what the link is.
- Animated glowing lights to the buildings
- The biggest change to the village and the website at large was the introduction of elves. Animated elves up to elf business and fun. Elves became our avatars to engage children further.
Elves Everywhere: An Elf Life
We wanted to create an avatar that could become real virtually with a name and backstory that our audience would identify and connect with while engaging with the Santa Tracker experience. Thus “Elfie” was born as the first of many elves that would appear around the digital experience.
We worked with NORAD to create a social media campaign and contest to name the elf with the winner announced on both the website and social media through a introduction in mid December.
We set about making elves and placing them through out the North Pole village and also on all the subpages of content doing the activities that the children could do in those sections. We also created elves for special events that NORAD could use outside of the website and mobile apps. Here is a sampler of the many elves.
Social Media Engagement
To create more community engagement, we encouraged NORAD to consider adding Instagram, Pinterest, and Google Plus along with their existing Twitter and Facebook accounts to reach a broader audience given Instagram's popularity particularly with younger generations.
Across the platforms we suggested to promote:
- a contest to name “Elfie” the elf
- a contest to explore the website and mobile apps to find other elves where the first x number of people to find them all would get a prize int he form of exclusive content.
- the games as they dropped each day. (We had 23 partner provided games on the website that would unlock each day in December from the 1st to 23rd).
- the activities on the holiday activity page like the interactive coloring pages we created for Microsoft Edge users
The example of these activities and additions to the website were insturmental in increasing traffic and engagement during December to the Library (Holiday Activities), NORAD HQ, and the Arcade (games page).
Responsive Design and Native Mobile
Responsive design was long overdue especially as our data showed more and more people each year were tracking Santa on smart phones. We also wanted to integrate our current visual language and branding with our native mobile partner.
Mobile visitors accounted for 65% of NORAD Santa Trackers yearly visitors to the website by the third year of the project
While Israel was working on the 3D models, I designed the responsive experience in three phases over the design sprints. The phased approach was to also provide a design system for the Santa tracker and native mobile partners, so they had time to integrate the designs into their respective areas. I used French and German content in the mobile designs for layout and spacing of labels, content, and UI control design.
Phase 1: Outer Space, Inner Space, North Pole Village, and Footer
Testing the Mobile Design
In the third year, we conducted another round of usability tests on the website focused on the content improvements to the Library and NORAD Headquarters. In short, we still had a ways to go to optimize the content which I talk about in the Year 4 the section.
We also created some tasks and questions for the responsive mobile design. One of the objectives of the study was to test various icons for the main navigation. Naturally icons would resonate better with children than text labels, so we added this to the rest of the study objectives.
Iterating on the Library and NORAD Headquarters
As time is always a challenge each year, we worked closely with NORAD and Bing to maximize value on the website by pitching our content and design ideas. In our pursuit to move the needle of engagement, a fast win was to add icon and images to every call to action and navigation item as shown in the Library and Headquarters screens.
For the library, Israel and I discussed making the links books rather than just a button with label to increase curiosity and engagement. We wanted to provoke a feeling of home coziness, and shared activities that families do together like read bedtime stories. We decided to draw inspiration and visually theme the books in the spirit of “Little Golden Books” that I read and collected as a child.
In year 3, we added a new section of content about different holiday traditions around the world working with NORAD on regions and traditions that they wanted to highlight. This also helped us with a secondary business goal of driving search traffic to Bing and increasing engagement. We accomplished this by using Bing maps and geotagging the regions for the holiday traditions and adding a call to action to learn more about the festival, religious celebration, and region through a link to Bing’s search engine.
Challange 3: Increasing Engagement With the Content
Year 4: Gamifying the Christmas Experience
We felt confident in year four, NORAD confirmed the visual design and direction of the website was exceeding their expectations from the work we had made in year 2 and 3. But that didn’t stop my ambition of what I wanted to improve.
Plannign for year 4, there were five focus areas that defined year four.
- The Arcade
- Expanding Language Support
- Improving the Holiday Traditions
- Adding to the Santa Tracking Experience
The Arcade
From the year 3 usability study and our development and transition to a mobile first website we understood that the current games partner was not meeting our expectations with their HTML5 games. Specifically, half of the games were not responsive/adaptive and they had little interest in rectifying this, so we parted ways with them.
This created an unexpected challenge as we needed to find a games partner and fast, as the games were the number two draw to the website after tracking Santa.
Fortunately, we found a partner from the Netherlands who created high quality games that were mobile responsive, and they generously gave us a license to use their games.
Expanding Language Support
In the fourth year, I proposed we expand language support based on the holiday traditions content to Arabic, Hindi, and Russian in addition to English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, German, Portuguse, Italian, and French. However, after reviewing the site analytics of regions where people where visiting the website from and customer interviews it was determined that there wasn't the value add here.
Improving the Holiday Traditions
Traditions Around the World had seen a little bit of traffic in year 3, with some comments in social media, and this was an important feature for NORAD, so I decided to turn this into a game to increase engagement and make it more interactive by turning it into a game.
The user would help an elf locate the regions and gain a point by correctly finding the region on the map.
Adding to the Santa Tracking Experience
One of the design challenges with the Santa Tracker experience I was asked to solve for in year 4 was to create additional content that would help drive more engagement to Bingon the Santa Tracker screen. What made it more interesting is that it was an late unplanned in the season request by Microsoft. In my feature and design solution I had two constraints to consider. The first was not taking away from the Santa tracking experience or confuse our audience with possibly unrelated content. The second was how to fit this content into a small form factor of a mobile phone, particularly in the landscape orientation viewport.
My solution was threefold:
The first involved creating a seamless integration by creating a photo carousel of places Santa visited and prompted the call to action to select an image by asking if the audience had visited there as well. Naturally, this was considered for older children or adults as was outside our primary audience of preschoolers who can’t read and would not select an image, unless by accident.
The second was a way to get the user back to the Santa Tracker from Bing without the need to use the browser back button. This was accomplished this with an iframe for the desktop web and mobile web experience.
The third solution, considering the mobile landscape form factor and area the photo carousel with the tracking stats would occupy, I added a control bar to swipe to show and hide the carousel container. This design solution was agreed upon by the stakeholders, and according to the analytics it was popular as 93% of our users selected more than 1 photo and swiped horizontally through the complete carousel. I intended to further design explorations the following year.
The photo carousel and the interactive geotagged locations (not shown due to NDA) on the tracker map of Santa's visits resulted in achieving the highest single day traffic to Bing in the fourth year.
Impact
Ring Out Ring Out Christmas Bells
Over the four years leading the Santa Tracking experience we recorded a net 18% gain of traffic and increased the number of page views by 5 from 2 on average visit (not considering Games and Tracker) from over 20 regions across the world. While feedback from our audience has always been extremely positive, there has been some negative feedback with certain aspects of the entire experience. When I left to pursue a new opportunity, it was with a heavy heart that I would not be able to work on this product further as I still had a roadmap of features and design ideas left on the table. I am proud of the work we accomplished each year with a tiny team and tight timeline.
Increased engagement to website overall from year 1 to year 4 of 25%
Increased time on site and interaction with Library of 5 minutes
Increased engagement with website between 2 Dec and 23 Dec from year 1 to year 4 of 18%
Audience
Coffee Queen
"This app is really amazing, been using it for years, would not ever use another app to track Santa."
Social Media
MG DE
"He just came to Berlin! Thank you, Santa. We really needed to see you this year"
Social Media
Jana V
"We've just seen him in Prague now. Rudolf's red nose was well visible 😊"
Social Media
D'Anna B
"Had to look on a map to find this location! Thanks for making geography fun on Christmas Eve!"
Social Media
Judith L
"My 10yr old daughter is so excited for tomorrow and can't wait to track Santa. It's something we do every year. Even though I'm 51 I have to say I thoroughly enjoy watching him travel the world."
Social Media
Lorinda E
"This is so cute guys its tracking santa all over the world. The pics are amazing. Can't wait for him to come to South Africa"
Social Media
KG
"I'm 10, and I love tracking santa. 😊"
Social Media
Press
iPhone
Android
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