“Good luck guys.”

With these words and a knowing chuckle, Laura Speers passed off 4 million data points to the Free Range strategy team led by Susan Sobel Finkelpearl.

A week later, Susan’s head felt as if it was going to explode. The KIDS COUNT mission was simple enough: provide legislators and advocates with information so they can protect vulnerable children. But the task at hand was daunting — state data, national data, demographic data sorted and displayed as charts, graphs, ranking schemes, and more. And the icing on the cake? The data needed to be served up in a mobile format, allowing child advocates and busy Hill staffers to execute complex custom searches on deadline and in between briefings.

Creating smart information architecture means building something users are comfortable with — something they’ve seen before. But Susan’s team had searched for days. There wasn’t a single role model for an intuitive desktop data site let alone a mobile presentation that carried the volume and variety of data as KIDS COUNT.

Fighting off a migraine, Susan decided to take a shopping break and switched over to Amazon.com. There, she was subtly and clearly guided to complete her purchase. Step by step, she knew what to do without thinking. But she never did buy the books she was after. She was interrupted by a paradigm shift in her thinking about KIDS COUNT. People know what they want, she realized. They just need some help getting past the clutter and focusing on the precise information they are shopping for.

Armed with this insight, Susan and her team whittled the KIDS COUNT website into a highly simplified, guided mobile experience that funnels users to the numbers need. Visit the KIDS COUNT mobile site and you’ll see for yourself. You’d never guess what’s lurking beneath the surface. And you don’t have to, you just have to shop for the data you need. According to Speer: "Susan and her team did an amazing job balancing the needs of the website with our potential users. And they came up with a site that was clean and professional looking but engaging to people who care about kids.