Reimagining the Online Presence of Scholastic Classroom Magazines

Client

Scholastic

Role

Visual/UI Design
Product Design
Art Direction

Overview

Scholastic Classroom Magazines is a complete package of print magazines and engaging digital resources for teachers and students. There are 32 distinct brands covering a wide range of topics for grades Pre-K-12. They contain quality content written by Scholastic editors with differentiation and SEL integrated into the product. There is standards support and flexibility for various classroom needs.

The Problem

The Classroom Magazine websites were extremely outdated and needed a complete restructure and redesign. They were also being migrated into a completely new CMS, and needed design solutions that worked for this. The sites had no search capabilities, no HTML pages, and a lot of useful content was not being surfaced. The online brand was also disconnected from the print magazine. With the product being print-centric, there was a need to really amplify the digital experience. With increasing competition of digital ed-tech products, we needed to distinguish ourselves with modern features and rich content.

Research

Based on user research, we discovered some painpoints for teachers regarding planning and teaching.

Slow wifi connection
Lack of funding for the classroom
Distracted or unengaged students
Lack of time to plan and teach
Information overload online
Not tech savvy
Communication difficulties with parents
Paper limits for printing

Goals

We had specific goals in mind to address many of these user painpoints.

Create robust HTML pages with new features and engaging multimedia
Improve the user experience for use in the classroom
Help teachers save time with content that is easier to access, and flexible to use
Create a product more accessible for all
Add new features like text-to-speech, bookmarking, digital quizzes and activities

The Solution

My role on this project was to lead the visual design. The magazines were grouped into categories that needed similar solutions. These 3 groups included Science, News and Art, Early Childhood, and ELA.

Workshops

The beginning of the project kicked off with workshops discovering the various pain points of teachers from each grade level. With this insight, the UX team created User Journeys and Personas. These journeys traveled through the typical day of a teacher, discovering pain-points along the way. With these pain points we listed opportunities on how we can ease these with the new sites.

Wireframes

Because we had such a small in-house team for a project of this scope, wireframes were completed by a digital agency whom we collaborated with along the way. After several rounds a final solution was reached for the first group of sites. We then collaborated with the agency design studio to create a generic template. With this template our in-house team applied the branding of each magazine. I led the design on the first magazine, ScienceWorld, which would then set the stage for the remaining magazines in this subset.

Iconography

For the Early Childhood sites I illustrated icons that were used in the explore bar. Some of the icons changed by season. These helped to make the site more age appropriate and visual for the littlest learners.

Note: These sites are behind a paywall, so only screenshots can be shown.

Beta Testing

Before launch, we tested the beta site on teachers and advisors that are current users of the product. These are some of the tasks we asked them to complete:

Site Login: Is the experience easy for them?
Logged in Homepage: Can they easily locate recent issues? What do they do first?
Search: Is it easy and intuitive? How do they use the filters?
Story Page: Are they able to quickly locate their resources? What features do they find most useful? What features would they like to see?
Topics: Do they browse by topic? Which topics would they most commonly use?
Overall: Is the site easy to use? Can they quickly find what they need? What do they think of the new design?

The Results

Overall the sites were a hit with the teachers! Here are the takeaways from the user tests:

Teachers were able to search easily and navigate
They loved the topics bar for quick access
The site was easy to use and they thought the new design was very clean and friendly
They loved the quick access to features on the article page toolbar
They were happy to see all their resources easily accessible
They couldn't wait to start using the new sites

Future Goals

Although the sites are redesigned, there are still improvements to be made. During this process we've been working on the following:

Sending surveys out to teachers to learn more about their wants and needs
Visiting classrooms to see their day to day and how the product is used
Finding ways to make their experience easy, nimble, and accessible
Implementing a design system to help streamline the site groupings, save costs on future updates, and ease production down the road