Everyone loves the Commonplace map! Even more so now.
Our tech team has given some tender loving care to our map feature. As the community heatmap product has grown in popularity, we've seen as many as 35,000 suggestions added to a single digital consultation project in the space of just a few weeks.
In response to COVID-19 and the surge in physical distancing plans, and since lockdown began, the map tool has attracted over 375,000 contributions from over 60,000 respondents.
This is great news for our customers and even better news for the communities they serve. The map is a great tool for gathering feedback on your plans or generating ideas for your locality. And for our communities, it enables respondents to view all the comments in the context of a specific location.
It was not such great news for our servers. When we built the map feature four years ago, we couldn't have imagined this scale of demand. So, it became important for us to improve the efficiency of loading so many comments and agreements to the map.
The team did an awesome job and reduced the load speed by 80%. We've future proofed too, so that when we hit 100,000 suggestions, or maybe even 250,000, we'll be able to handle the growth with ease.
There's plenty more to come with the community heatmap product in the next few weeks and months.
Of greatest interest to our customer community:
- Upgraded experience for mobile users, especially those on older smaller screens, delivering higher conversion rates
- Improvements to those using Commonplace from within the Facebook mobile app, which makes up a big portion of our customers' traffic
- Respondents will be able to add an image or photo to help explain their comment
Of greatest interest to our respondent community:
- Easier to add a comment by clicking or tapping directly on the map
- Possibility to a comment in exactly the same location as another user
- Switch between map and satellite view
We're excited to see our market leading spatial engagement tool evolve even further and stretch the imagination of both our customers and communities. The features we'll be adding soon simply wouldn't have been possible with technology available to us a couple of years ago.
As always, we'd love to hear about your experiences using our community heatmap feature. If you have any suggestions, do get in touch to let us know or add your comments below.
The Commonplace Product Team