A recipe for simplicity

In an effort for ECP to gather viewership data, people who were interested in gaining access to a presentation had to complete the same long form, providing demographic and audience information each time. This was the case even for videos they have previously been granted access to. It was easy for educators to be confused about how to access videos, as each individual request came with an email with a unique password. It was hard for educators to keep track of these unique passwords and would often require support from ECP staff.

We walked through the user flows of the current journey of accessing and watching a presentation in order to identify the pain-points and drop-off points. Our approach was to create a centralized library of presentations with a simplified onboarding process, giving higher visibility to their wealth of educational information. This eliminated the use of one-time passwords and repetitive requests for access from their loyal user base. This also gave ECP consistent viewership data in order to maintain their reporting capabilities as a
non-profit.

Crafting accessible solutions

During our conversations with ECP staff, we learned that their educators often need help with tasks like locating emails and navigating the videos and resources.

Our team conducted a brief audit of their current solution in order to identify where users were getting stumped and what user-experience issues were blocking someone from successfully achieving their goal of accessing content. We listened to ECP staff member’s difficulties in having to dedicate a significant amount of time responding to customer service requests.

Moving to an account-based approach allows educators to set their credentials they can remember and save to their device, eliminating the need to keep track of emails and unique passwords granting access to content. Keeping the needs of these users in mind, we ensured the copy on the site provided understandable directions and clearly defined actions. We took careful consideration in validating the color contrast and text to ensure a highly accessible, legible design across the site.

Tracking metrics for non-profit success

Frequently, educators assign these presentations as homework with their students. With ECP’s previous digital solution, their staff were unable to track when educators were sharing content. With views and audience information being important data for their reporting purposes, they needed a way to track these crucial metrics.

During our discovery and ideation workshops, we brainstormed many potential approaches on how we could track shares, so that educators could easily be onboarded to the new platform when attempting to view a presentation shared with them, but that students and younger viewers could access without needing to provide any identifying information.

We landed on a solution to provide educators with a unique student access link that allowed them to share a presentation with their younger viewers without needing any credentials to watch it. This allows ECP to track the number of shares and views per specific educator – an important metric that wasn’t available prior to our engagement.