On March 29th, we launched Eviction Free NYC with the Right to Counsel Coalition as part of a campaign to educate tenants living in affordable housing on their legal rights and how to navigate the daunting process of receiving an eviction notice.
In order to build this new resource we applied a human-centered design process followed by specialized technical scoping in order to determine what was best for our users and build something for this unique context. That process led us to using GatsbyJS, Contentful, and Netlify! Below, we’ve written up how we mapped design to dev, approached different stakeholders, and utilized Gatsby’s great flexibility & plugin library.
Mapping Design Considerations to Technical Scoping
We started this process with a pretty strong sense of our average user’s technical capacity and degree of comfort in using a website or app. For the past 3 years, we’ve been collecting user insights from the JustFix.nyc Tenant Web-App and other resources. As you might imagine, the majority of our users are coming from mobile devices (over 95% of low-income Americans now have a device that connects to the Internet) and usually do not have a very fast connection to the Internet. We learned from user-testing in Housing Court that there is usually little-to-no cell reception in the building. We also knew that internationalization (i18n) and language localization would be a launch requirement. Previous analytics from the Tenant Web-App also informed us to account for older browsers such as Internet Explorer 11, given that many older users and nonprofit employees still use it.
For coalition members, the site needed to be incredibly adaptable and easily managed from a Content Management System, or CMS. The RTC policy and coverage areas change on an almost daily basis, and thus required a content modelling system that would prevent the site from quickly becoming outdated. We also wanted to utilize this system to make it easy for new languages to be added and maintained with as little technical knowledge as possible.
Our solution: GatsbyJS
We knew that we would build the site in React. Developers can build websites quickly and reliably through its modular architecture and extensive system of third-party components. React’s simple component-based philosophy creates code and structure that just makes sense, allowing other developers to more easily contribute to the project as well. It’s also unobtrusive enough that it can be applied to both large and small web development projects.
From there, we looked for different scaffolds that would help us get up-and-running quickly. While we’re big fans of create-react-app and have used it on other projects, due to an aggressive project timeline, we needed something that provided a more “out-of-the-box” solution. We wound up building the site in GatsbyJS, which is a React-based static site generator. GatsbyJS is the perfect fit for a number of reasons:
- Static sites load content much more quickly than dynamic web applications, which require multiple back-and-forth calls to a server in order to display the final composited view to the user. They are more easily adaptable for low connectivity / offline functionality for this reason. This allows us to provide a faster and more reliable experience for tenants utilizing the service.
- GatsbyJS ships with an incredible amount of pre-handled optimization features, from prefetching resources to progressive image loading to inlining code blocks so they don’t need to be fetched via AJAX>). There was no way we could have achieved this level of optimization on our own in this timeframe.
- A growing plugin library that allows for easy integrations that utilize Gatsby’s GraphQL data query system. With these we could easily use things like gatsby-source-contentful and gatsby-plugin-i18n.
- A growing community of developers sharing resources and best practices. Credit is due to mccrodp for setting up gatsby-starter-contentful-i18n, a boilerplate that synced Contentful and i18n features together and allowed us to hit the ground running.
Using Contentful
Contentful is a “headless” Content Management System, or CMS. Traditional CMS platforms, like WordPress or Drupal, allow authors and editors to easily create websites and publish content such as text articles, image, or video embeds. A headless CMS takes those publishing features (and the easy admin tools that come with them) and additionally gives you total flexibility as to how the website itself is constructed.
In previous projects where we used Contentful, content was loaded dynamically (via AJAX) when a user visits the site. GatsbyJS instead pulls content from Contentful as the site compiles (pre-deploy), not when the user visits it. This change creates significantly less server requests after page load and further speeds up the site’s final load time.
With Contentful, you define Content Models in tandem with coding individual pages in order to construct the structure of the site and its content. For Eviction Free NYC, some sample Content Models are Providers, Housing Court Action Steps, and meta-level page models, such as LandingPage.
As GatsbyJS compiles the site (either in dev or building for production), it will pull content from Contentful and make it available via GraphQL. A file’s GraphQL pageQuery will then populate your React component’s props with the corresponding data, creating an incredibly simple pipeline from content → code. As an example, here’s the provider portion of a sample pageQuery:
Challenge: Hyper-personalized result pages in a static site
When a tenant goes to Eviction Free NYC, they answer a simple questionnaire that determines a results page. It’s tailored to their borough’s housing court (including information about room numbers and different parts) and factors in their eligibility for legal representation as well as different types of eviction proceedings. This level of personalization is difficult to achieve in a static site and manage in a CMS. We wound up finding a solution that gave us flexibility and reuse of content while preserving the static page nature of GatsbyJS.
The four variables for generating these pages were language, housing court, case type, and eligibility. A quick calculation gave us the basic number of result pages:
2 languages x 5 different housing courts x 3 different case types x (y/n) eligibility = 60 static results pages!
This doesn’t include additional pages we built afterwards to account for NYCHA tenants and other situations. Here’s an example of what this looks like in Contentful:
There are 6 potential pathways that a user could be taken (seen above as Holdover, Qualifies; Holdover, Doesn’t Qualify, etc) per housing court. These were represented as arrays of references to Housing Court Action Steps, which are in turn represented in Contentful as editable Markdown snippets. This system allows for steps to be reused (see “Brooklyn Housing Court location” above) and for third-party content, such as Google Maps, to be embedded in the steps. To reorder a step or change a part of the process for a specific court or case type, you can simply drag-n-drop things in Contentful!
From there, we had to teach GatsbyJS how to properly render each page based on pathway. We did this by implementing the createPages function in the Gatsby Node API. For each Housing Court Page (also per language!), Gatsby creates 6 different pages based on the pathways. While our solution had to account for some limitations in GraphQL, everything wound up working as needed.
Feel free to explore the source code to get a better sense of how all this works!
Wrapping everything up: using Netlify
When it came time to deploy, we were very excited to try out a new hosting platform called Netlify that we’d been hearing a lot about. It has a great free tier and is perfect for hosting static sites. We simply linked Netlify to a branch in the Eviction Free NYC GitHub repo and it compiles and deploys the site with each push. It simplifies HTTPS certificate generation and even includes a system for deploying AWS Lambda functions, which we used to ship a small Twilio integration for the site’s “Save to Phone” feature. (note: we’re actually still using the original Serverless solution, but this code is in the repo as a to-do)
The best feature of Netlify is its ability to utilize build hooks. This allows us to trigger a new site build when someone edits or adds content from Contentful. Contentful’s webhook functionality will fire an event when content is edited or published. Once you link the two together, Netlify will receive the event, rebuild the site, and deploy everything. Done!
In Conclusion
The technical process for building the site went by incredibly fast — this all came together in a little over a month! Despite the frenzied speed, we created a valuable new service that also acts as a launching pad for future feature development and refinement. It’s already been used by over 1,000 people in the past few weeks! We’re really excited for this site to grow and develop as tenants take advantage of this historic new right.
Footnote: Our code for evictionfreenyc.org is open source! Click here to view the code on GitHub.