The redesigned America After 3PM site is made of two interwoven components of a scrollytelling landing page and a data explorer that visually tell the story of participation in, and unmet demand for, afterschool programs; the experiences and opportunities programs afford; and which children and families are missing out, and why.

The landing page (above) for America After 3PM serves as an executive summary, a short, engaging overview of the key points from this year’s data on after school care. This allows a casual visitor to glean the key takeaways in just a few minutes, even if they never dive deeper to the data explorer page. We used a technique called scrollytelling, which integrates animation and transitions into the natural scrolling behavior of web browsers. As users scroll down the page, charts and graphics animate into place, and transition to new charts. Each chart is paired with a short description, which is woven together into a larger narrative.

From this opening narrative, there are several opportunities to dive deeper using the data explorer view. This view allows the user to see all the underlying data at the National level, as well as for each U.S. State. Through best practices around information design and user experience design, the data explorer allows easy navigation between geographies and across topics, so the full breadth of data is only a couple clicks away.