Education
Website
Customer Research
UI & UX Design
Usability Testing
My role in this project was to implement a holistic design and marketing strategy from discovery to purchase. During this project, I worked closely with our Marketing Manager, Graphic Designers, Photographer and Videographers, Development Team, and Executive Director to better align the company’s vision with our digital strategies. As the Lead Designer I performed a wide range of roles–many of which included: conducting user/ customer research, crafting our brand and key messaging, and overseeing the UI/ UX redesign for our website.
Fostering opportunities for students to develop resilient mindsets and gain lifelong skills has been of significant importance in novel approaches to education.
Many educators are starting to embrace the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) movement as a way to prepare students for the modern-day challenges they will likely face. The STEAM Project (TSP) was founded in the early stages of this movement to reinforce learning for youth through its unique coding, robotics, and maker programs.
While the importance of education in youth development is very clear; parents are faced with a sea of options for extra-curricular programs for their kids.
As the first measure to determine business priorities, I worked with the Marketing Manager to formulate a competitor analysis.
We assessed our products, website, SEO rankings, and social media presence against competitors in our market. The insights gained from this analysis helped us build a framework to inform and direct our marketing and design efforts.
As an extension of our analysis, I evaluated our current internal processes and identified opportunities to improve customer touch points. We chose to focus our immediate efforts on the consideration and evaluation stage. The goals of this initiative were to:
Considering the nature of our programs, I segmented our target audience between customers and users. The customers include parents, while the users are kids in JK to Grade 9.
My casual interactions with customers led to a bigger conversation about how we might use our existing customer base to align our current marketing, customer experience, and retention strategies.
The goal of the customer interviews was to identify and understand factors that affect parents’ choice in an extra-curricular program for their child. I led customer interviews with 9 participants from our target customers, and invited the Marketing Manager and Executive Director to sit in and observe. Involving the core decision-makers in the interviews helped us take a more customer-focused approach to solving our current business challenges.
“Once we’ve finished with a class, we want to know what’s next–what can they take? We always love to see new content and programs available. It keeps us on our toes.”
We had a general idea of who our customers were based on interactions with parents at our programs and events, however; we wanted to know the landscape of our business in order to grow our reach and visibility. To find out who our customers are, their consumption patterns, and the best way to target them, we performed market research using Environics Analytics, which provided us with customer segments within a 15km radius of our brick-and-mortar location.
“At first, my kids were intimidated to enrol in a ‘science & tech’ program. They were worried it would be too advanced, but the hands-on building and design focus is what drew them in.”
The insights gained from our market research and customer interviews started to shape our understanding of our customers’ behaviours and motivations. After analyzing the data, we identified three major customer segments within our target audience. I create personas based on our findings to better understand how each makes decisions, what ideas, messages, and imagery resonate with them, and how to leverage opportunities from other spheres of influence.
“I feel so lucky and relieved that I was able to get him a spot in this program. Usually these programs fill up quickly, so I signed him up for the whole summer as soon as I could.”
Once we established our customers and their motivational drivers, I took the insights further and mapped out the opportunities and weaknesses of our customer touch points. Developing a customer journey map would help us frame how our customers interact with our business at each stage and through which channels, and consider how we might create continuity between our website and social media.
From discussions with customers, I learned how we had to be more aware of the language and representation we use as parents were concerned that classes may be too advanced for their kids. This could be addressed in course descriptions, the imagery associated, and the way listings are presented. For instance, using parent-friendly language that increases in complexity and fine-tuned for each level to help manage complexity.
An on-going challenge with our website was determining the most effective way to structure the navigation of our website from discovery to registration. With our product offerings constantly evolving, we had to continually rethink how to design, market, and simplify the purchase experience. Each design pattern we tested presented several challenges in usability and back-end management.
Striking the right balance between educating and highlighting unique features of our programs was an on-going challenge for us. We grappled with questions about the level of detail, relative importance, and subject matter to present. It was important to showcase the technical skills students would gain while being mindful of varying skill levels.
Over countless iterations of the website and testing throughout the process, we still encountered many frustrations after launch. Due to development constraints we had less flexibility in testing marketing approaches.The constantly changing product line also impacted the usability of the site as some design patterns became less suitable for the content and user flow. Since we could not predict when or if our product line would remain stable, we had to shift our marketing and development processes from more experimental and reactive to feature-based.
