Back-to-School Toolkit

This interactive toolkit for educators builds a grab-and-go set of materials for the first week of school.

Building on the Facing History and Ourselves brand, this custom tool is designed to be a unique and engaging experience. It allows educators to navigate easily between lessons on any device, download curriculum, and sign up to stay engaged via email or SMS.

Challenge

Creating a product on an aggressive, time-sensitive timeline for the product to be useful to teachers for their first week of school meant working in a series of highly collaborative sprints within a small team. Keeping audience needs at top of mind throughout this process meant providing multiple ways to access resources and stay engaged to match the disparate technical needs of teachers from around the country.

Impact

Performed better than 75% of existing site content
Increased time on site by 200%
Garnered nearly 10% of the sites pageviews
30% of users downloaded content

Launch the Toolkit

Role
User Experience Design Lead
Visual Design Lead
Interaction Design
QA

ThinkShout Team
1 Strategist
2 Developers
1 Producer
1 Designer

Key Features
Downloads of all content available in multiple formats
Progressive Registration Experience
Mobile-first approach with collapsable sections and sticky navigation

Discovery: Research + Usability Testing

A fast and broad discovery

This fast project needed to have impact with a very specific audience, younger educators. Our team created a place to reach out to them and run usability testing from the start.

Process

Collaborative Workshop
Recruiting Users from Audience Groups
User Surveys + Interviews
User Flows
Usability Testing Plan

User Experience: Wireframes

A streamlined user experience for teachers on the go

This product is meant to be used for a targeted period of time and offers a robust amount of content and downloadable assets. The clean user experience (designed for all breakpoints) provides a broad view alongside detailed context, making it useful to educators with little free time. In order to make dozens of downloadable assets useful on smaller screens, the design integrates sticky menus, anchor links and collapsible content for a user-friendly, intuitive workflow.

Challenges

Streamline dozens of assets into a simple, scannable experience

Integrate multiple types of downloads for each lesson and individual asset

Create pathways that allow a birds eye view of the content while encouraging a progressive workflow

Visual Design

Designing a Time-Based Product

Working from the Facing History core brand, this product needed to have a unique presence. Starting with their core brand element, we expanded the system, creating new iconography and textures to brand this product that lives within the larger brand ecosystem. The engagement model and social media strategy were paired with the launch to make this one of the most successful product launches for Facing History in 2019.