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Breastcancer.org Mobile

Custom Ruby on Rails Development
Client: Breastcancer.org

Client since 2000

Project Overview

Breastcancer.org is a Philadelphia-area non-profit organization with the most heavily trafficked breast cancer website in the world (source: Alexa). Breastcancer.org helps millions of women every year understand their breast cancer diagnosis and make informed treatment decisions.

Breastcancer.org began this project with one thought: the world is going mobile. They had recently launched an iPhone app that had seen over 2 million in-app pageviews and 10,000 downloads.

Breastcancer.org had also seen a tenfold increase in website traffic from mobile devices over the past two years. While the website’s desktop traffic was also increasing, mobile traffic was growing even faster: going from less than 2% of site traffic to more than 15%.

But there was a problem: these mobile visitors were viewing fewer pages and leaving the site sooner than desktop users.

A mobile-optimized site was seen as an important step in furthering Breastcancer.org’s ability to fulfill its mission.

Breastcancer.org also knew that optimizing for mobile would allow them to reach new audiences. According to recent Pew Internet Project surveys, Latino cell phone users are significantly more likely than other groups to use their cell phone to look for health information: 25% do so, compared with 15% of non-Hispanic whites (source: Mobile Health 2010). Breastcancer.org had recently translated significant portions of the website into Spanish, and it was important to get this content out to mobile users as well.

Breastcancer.org turned to Foraker Labs to take advantage of this opportunity to grow their reach. Foraker developed a prototype mobile website for use in user testing, which was built on top of a previously-developed Ruby on Rails content syndication app. After completing usability testing with 10 participants, Foraker made refinements based on the results. The prototype mobile site was then finalized and prepared for production launch.

Prior to launch, mobile users of the Breastcancer.org website lagged behind desktop users in pages per visit (-22%), time on site (-22%), and bounce rate (+8%). Following launch, mobile users have jumped ahead of desktop users in pages per visit (+21%) and time on site (+4%). The bounce rate for mobile users has dropped by nearly 60%.

Next on the list is a mobile-optimized experience for the Breastcancer.org Discussion Boards. This custom Ruby on Rails forum application is the largest breast cancer community in the world, with over 400,000 visits each month, and over 2.5 million pageviews per month.