Ed Tech Partnerships
Design Manager
Client Project
Ed Tech
Problem
We were tasked with finding a way to display offers to students when they landed on the website home page, as well as when they used their digital textbook. These offers were from business partners that wanted to extend discounts to students and instructors.
Approach
We wanted students to be able to access their offers, but to do so without being distracted from their studies. To accomplish this, we ideated different ways for offers to present in the two key circumstances students would see them:
When coming from the home page, students aren't actively engaged in learning, so offers can be presented in a more visual way with less concern about distracting them.
When coming from the digital textbook, we didn't want students to loose their place or have a harder time focusing, so we wanted our solution to respect those boundaries.
For scenario 1, we made offers more visually present, occupying a section on the authenticated home page. For scenario 2, we hid offers behind a simple text button, and had it open a modal, then a new tab on click.
Wins
Advocated for students having access to their online textbooks without pop-up ads or other things that might prove distracting.
Found a way to make offers visible only one click in, but also made it easy for students to return to studying without losing their place (via opening a new tab when coming from a digital textbook, and having a modal show prior to that).
Tailored design and visibility to match situations students were in, so as not to distract from studying.
Lessons
Brand guidelines for companies that arranged partnerships were fairly lax, and posed problems that we realized retroactively, presenting logo contrast color challenges and word count / text usage differences for each offer.
I'd partner better with the business counterparts to set more detailed style guide expectations in the future, to show example text usage guardrails more effectively, and to better plan for the range of inputs we got back, to reduce churn and rework time.
Explore the prototype
s
This shows the user's journey from the digital textbook to the offers page.
Here is the user's journey to explore an offer they saw on the home page.
