Client Overview

Yahoo! for teachers was a new online community built around teachers sharing their expertise, stories, lessons and friendship. Two of the founders wanted to take this idea to the next level and asked Visde to create a new identity, interactive model and develop this idea into a freestanding online community site to replace the Yahoo! concept property.

Business Challenges and Requirements

Visde took the background interactions from the Yahoo! site along with new opportunities introduced by the clients based on customer feedback and focused the new design around the things that teachers valued most - saving time. Researching their needs, the value propositions became clearer and this helped focus the design on finding resources that helped the teacher in their classroom. Next, we added features to create a profile and begin sharing their own resources. Thirdly, as the relationship grew, tools to allow conversations, inviting friends and building a community. By taking a tiered approach we could focus on customer acquisition in the beginning, but quickly build a user base to help the community grow and thrive.

Our Design/Solution

Having a solid foundation meant we could take larger steps in the interaction goals for this site. Starting with extensive use of the newest AJAX interaction patterns meant more time manipulating information rather than searching and browsing. Because this new type of interaction is more difficult to storyboard, building a high-fidelity prototype that actually allowed us to fine tune these rich interactions became a key ingredient to delivering a user-focused design. Visde also partnered with new technologies and services such as Scribd and Slideshare to allow users to imbed their resources in the browser making for easier parsing and searching of content from contributors and newcomers alike. In the devleopment phase, the high-fidelity XHTML/CSS javascript prototype allowed us to hone interactions and designs exactly and the developers can use the results directly, saving hundreds of hours in development and allowing them to focus on back-end functionality.

Benefits and Results

By working through the user experience design thoroughly before development we were to market quicker and with less rework. Edtuit is currently in private beta and is accepting beta testing at www.edtuit.com.