The company is traditionally known for its patented yellow booklet, but has always been a trailblazer in the digital age. Every year, millions of high school students are applying for college, and rely on outdated, static and thick college prep guides from the likes of
Princeton Review, Barron's, and others. The question was simple: How could Playbill break into the education space and help students interested in Music, Dance, and Theater find a better way to search for colleges during application season?
From the onset, Playbill built a comprehensive database that catalogued hundreds of bits of quantifiable information about thousands of colleges. We analyzed the large dataset and started to
brainstorm the most effective ways to give students, parents, and college counselors a set of data visualization tools to directly compare colleges. The result is a rich, interactive web application called PlaybillEDU.
A enterprise-scale content management environment enables Playbill to rapidly change University Information and immediately reflect it on the frontend.
The product gives students, parents, teachers and counselors multiple ways to compare large datasets in beautiful and engaging charts and graphics.
Students and parents are increasingly using mobile devices to access the web, so HTML5 components like SVG and Canvas are used to render objects in all browsers.
Each University automatically gets its own microsite when administrators add new colleges into the PlaybillEDU system.