Copy of Get Schooled – Case Study

When Get Schooled, a national nonprofit born from Viacom and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, received a Google Global Impact Award, they challenged HYFN to build a sticky educational platform for teens while nailing an extensive list of business objectives. Focused on delivering a signature mix of “sizzle and substance” content to low/moderate income students, Get Schooled needed a site that was engaging in UX, design, and strategy while servicing educators, parents, and funders through separate experiences, integration, and reporting.

ROLE

• Responsible for the vision, visual design and interaction design

• Worked with a UX designer to come up with the wireframes, and IA for the experience

• Used research and data provided by UX researcher to make design decisions

CHALLENGES

• Faced with a large, existing content design and information architecture

• Very short timeline Worked with a large team of designers and developers

• The prior 3 agencies did not meet their expectations and under delivered

PROCESS

I worked with the user experience research team to help develop the user flows, wireframes and IA for the responsive website. The decisions made were based on data about our target users based on findings from research articles, publications, online survey data along with analytics from running version of the site at the time. The information gathered gave us insight on post high school education trends, fears about college, process with applying, demographic information, support, behavior and technology usage. The road to get to college is very difficult for our target audience and gave us a sense of empathy of the hardships. The last thing we wanted to do was to make the experience feel like another chore that they had to do. 

A content strategy of weaving “sizzle and substance” in to the content would make it interesting for the user like Chris Paul visiting a local school to articles show you how to get through the FAFSA process. A large part of the experience is a gamification layer. The more you interacted with the site, the more points you would earn to buy real life prizes or experiences. There would also be seasonal challenges to get an extra boost of points. These challenges were aimed at an important task for the student to do, like applying for financial aid. We also ranked the schools engagement by aggregating the total amount of points the participating students have earned during a challenge.  

Then used the research that was mined through market research, web analytics and stakeholder interviews to develop personas. Then leverage card sorting and tree testing to help us inform the information architecture.  

I also worked with the development team for the logic for the recommendation engine that power what content was served to the user based on their high school journey. A high performing senior was going to have a dramatically different content than a underachieving sophomore. We did this by weighing different dimension like where they are at in their tenure, the engagement with the site, scholastic performance and student profile.

I developed multiple wireframes for the UX team to test with people fitting our personas with clickable prototypes. We found strength and weaknesses with different versions and incorporated the feedback to the final wireframes. Consensus was made on the wireframes and interaction style to move forward with and started with the visual design. 

The design had to light in terms of load times because of the hardware found at schools from low income areas but visually appealing and interesting enough to keep the attention of a high school student. The brand was bright and lively and wanted to keep that spirit while not distract the user with the chrome and let the content be the centerpiece. We also learned from the research that families from these socio-economic areas primary connect through the internet through a mobile device and the experience would have to be as robust and usable on smart phones.

OUTCOME

• Fast Company ranked Get School in the top 10 innovating companies in gaming
• Nation’s largest digital education community aimed at students
• 8 Million Visits since its lauch
• Get Schooled reach over 2,000 schools and over 250k registered teens.