Officials from the U.S. Census Bureau are preparing for a data collection test in Maricopa County in 2015.

Regional director Cathy Lacy said the area was chosen as a test site for its diversity.

“This area has a large Hispanic population which has traditionally been hard to count and we want to be able to gauge the impact of various new processes on response rate for this demographic area," Lacy said.

She said those new processes include an online submission option as well as providing census takers with a new mobile app that will allow them to directly upload information to a cloud-based storage system.

The study will include 1.6 million Valley households. The Census Bureau will begin reaching out to them in March.