Blog article: Help us fix our Dataset Pages

Published on March 6, 2025
Help us fix our Dataset Pages

Article text

When users come to our site to learn about (and eventually download) data, they end up on one of our dataset pages. We want to make them better in 2025.

What we know

We’ve (anecdotally; we don’t have hard data here) accumulated complaints of issues with our dataset pages over the last couple years. These include:

  • When there are many downloads on a page that have different columns, only one set of columns is defined
  • There are map previews that only show a sample of data
  • API docs are hard to find and missing useful content
  • The Explore Data section of the site doesn’t always allow search of all records in a dataset

We want to fix these problems, but we want to make sure our fix considers our users’ preferences, too. We’ve fortunately already got some metrics showing us how users prefer to use our dataset pages.

Number of users who clicked on different parts of our dataset page's accordion in 2024. Users consistently click to access dataset downloads more than other site functionality
Number of users who clicked on different parts of our dataset page’s accordion in 2024. Users consistently click to access dataset downloads more than other site functionality

Users click to access dataset downloads most. Then, in order, they click to:

  • View a dataset’s columns’ definitions
  • Explore, filter, and search the data
  • Learn about the dataset’s quality score

What we’re doing

While this is helpful (it tells us what users choose to see when they’re on our dataset page), we want more data. To that end, we’re doing remote and in-person user research through Toronto-based meet ups like Civic Tech Toronto, Data Engineers in Toronto, and Machine Learning Toronto in early 2025. We’re collecting feedback on some draft-versions of our dataset pages, and asking folks some UX questions about the portal overall.

Want to help?

If you have the time to contribute to our work to upgrade the portal’s dataset pages, we’d really appreciate your input. You can help us by clicking here