Urban Influence is proud to announce the launch of a new site for INRIX – the leader in big data analytics for global driving, parking, and traffic applications.
Headquartered in Seattle, with offices worldwide, INRIX develops a variety of mobile and in-car applications that seek to make urban mobility more intelligent.
If you drive a car, have ever used a traffic / parking app, or just live in a city, you’ve undoubtably interacted with an INRIX product, or a product using INRIX data.
Large-scale Wp Build
Over the last few months, we worked closely with the INRIX team to develop a detailed appreciation for their needs and market. As the Company offers a large set of products and solutions, across a wide-range of industries, telling their story was no simple matter. It was essential to deliver a CMS that would provide their digital team with full control over content creation and authorship.
Beyond Pages & Posts
As a large-scale WordPress build, we developed a highly-tailored admin experience, featuring our own system of drag-and-drop ‘modules.’ These modules are essentially components of common UI patterns that can be selected, added and reordered on that code-free hotness.
This flexibility enabled the INRIX digital team to really fine-tune their storytelling efforts on a per page basis. No longer locked into static page templates, they could easily introduce new content and layouts for continuous testing, revising and perfecting.
Global Scorecards
In addition to their new marketing site and CMS, a project highlight involved transforming their impressive and exhaustive city traffic big data through interactive data visualization.
Each year, INRIX releases their Global Traffic Scorecards based on stats collected across in 1,064 cities, in 38 countries (the largest study of its kind). This year, we collaborated with their in-house data scientists to develop an SPA-style dashboard of city raking stats, relating to a variety of traffic congestion metrics.
To pull this off, we converted their data into JSON format (from CSV) and used Handlebars.js templating to dynamically populate a single view page featuring Chart.js visualizations, Google Map integration, and custom SVG iconography.
Since we self-authored much of the Javascript requirements, we managed to keep the build surprisingly lightweight and snappy.
A precursor page provides a variety of related reports, news, infographics, and a filterable/sortable table for city selection – also leveraging handlebars helpers and a custom client-side (JavaScript) sorting script.
You can check out the data vis Scorecards City Page Here
And, the actual Scorecards Page here
Hold Up. Did you say WordPress?
Yeah bruv, WordPress. At it’s heart, Wp is just a php framework, and as such, you can use it to build anything you can in PHP. It’s way less opinionated than people think and it ships with a bunch of handy APIs, like Authentication, Users, Custom Content Types, Custom Fields, etc. Plus, you easily design custom admins that provide clients with a tailored experience for user-friendly and code-free content management. No, it’s not a hipster MVC for sure, but with their new Rest API, you can quickly build api-driven applications, using JavaScript templating libs like Backbone.js and Handlebars.
And, considering that it powers like 25% of the web, it’s pretty battle-hardened and well documented. Not the right tool for every project, but for some, it does its job reliably.
Here’s our little Wp / Codekit Starter Framework for the curious.
In the News
The INRIX Scorecards page and reporting received a great deal of high profile attention, including articles on:
Project Highlights
- Large Scale Wp project, with over 10 Custom Post Types and Module-based admin experience
- Chart.js for visualization of Scorecard data
- Handlebars (.hbs) templates and custom helpers to pull city data from json and dynamically populate a single page view
- Custom Filterable and sortable table for city selection
- Custom Google map integration for dynamic city data
High Fives
The new INRIX.com was just featured on CSS Design Awards. Check it out.
The Team
On the Urban side, the team working on this product included Art Director Chaun Osburn, with Stephen Scaff (that’s me) and Thomas Vaeth on the front-end development.
So, go check out it.
And, don’t forget to see where your city traffic ranks on the Scorecards City Page