Captain 7 - Case Study

The Problem

Existing website and brand were not portraying value and encouraging conversions

Captain 7 has conducted several test incursions for grade 4 students as a proof of concept and was very well received by the schools. Upon seeing the initial success, they plan to turn this into something more established by expanding their reach into more educational institutions.

However, being a very early-stage startup, Captain 7 is yet to have an established product offering and online presence to represent and reach out to other institutions.

Our higher level goal was to...

Validate Captain 7’s product offering and maximise audience reach with a website.

The product was scoped with 2 main goals:

Validating Captain 7'sofferings through extensive user + industry research.
Reaching out to other schools by using a responsive website as an established online presence.

Business Objectives

Generate new leads / reach-outs
Increase conversion rate by 20%
Reduce bounce rate by 10%

User Goals

Find the right solution to supplement their missing classroom learnings
Engage the said solution (us) easily

Constraints

Existing brand guidelines
Restricted launch timelines
SEO keywords

Responsibilities

Leading design efforts (sketching, wireframing, visual, prototyping, layouts, etc.)
Facilitating design workshops

Feedback, Usability Tests and feedback

A human-centred approach, involving clients and educators every step of the way

To validate and keep our product direction correctly aligned, we followed a process that included our end-users (educators) and clients (Captain 7) as a key part of the decision making process. We relied on research and data to formulate recommendations that will guide the trajectory of our product offering.

Market Analysis

Learning from competitors and finding our market value

We looked at the various players within the education system including key government bodies, industry statistics and other similar design-focused incursion companies.

This helped us determine the various threats and opportunities to consider.

What we found

There is a rising demand and strong push to implement additional thinking skills in classrooms. 📈

Most ‘life-skills’ teachings provided in schools are still reliant on outsourced external providers. 🚶

Captain 7’s unique position lies in having expertise in both Education and Design industry. 🦄

User Research and Interviews

Understanding what our users and customers are looking for

To determine what the core of our product offering, we needed to understand exactly what are the key criterias and considerations for schools to engage an additional learnings providers such as Captain 7.

What we found

Schools are essentially businesses.

Teachers are forced to spend most of their time ticking boxes and quantifying outcomes, leaving them with no capacity to try anything new in their everyday teaching.

Design Thinking is an unfamiliar term, but highly desirable.

Teachers and parents are not familiar with the term design thinking, but are very familiar and receptive towards teaching Critical Thinking and Creative Problem Solving in classrooms.

Students are not learning to be ready for life.

Students are learning, but not the ‘life skills’ they need for the future. They lack processes to problem solve and therefore lack resilience when faced with problems.

At this point, there’s a clear agreement amongst our users (hailing across 4 different states and over 15 different schools) that Captain 7 is targeting real issues and pain points found in schools and classrooms. 💪

Personas

Identifying our key target audience / customer

To find Captain 7’s position in the industry, we looked at the education system as a whole including the key industry and government bodies working in this space.

Personas

Front Line Teachers

Educators who deal with students directly in everyday classrooms. They represent the biggest audience in this industry.

Need:

Provided the right support and resources to equip students with “life-ready” skills

Secondary Target

Decision Makers

They sit higher in the school hierarchical chain and deal directly with teachers more than students.

Need:

Ensure that various school requirements and expectations are met.

Tertiary Target

Burnt-out Veterans

Long years of teaching experience. They are too exhausted over their own workload to be able to try something new.

Need:

To integrate new curriculums into their existing lesson plans as easily as possible.

Design Workshop

Pivoting product direction for Captain 7.1

We facilitated a design workshop with Captain 7, bringing forward these key questions and our research-based recommendations. Instead of only offering school incursions and professional development workshops, Captain 7 would now prioritise programme delivery and curriculum development as its core offering.

This allows Captain 7 to integrate better with the school’s existing structure, and ensure a longer working relationship with the institute. Incursions and professional development workshops would then be ‘cherry-on-top’ addition to spur the newly developed program further.

Sketches

Determining information hierarchy and layout

After that mini workshop, we moved forward with low fidelity wireframes to consider how content might affect what each section looked like and the order we displayed it in.

We often found ourselves jumping between brainstorming content and designing to better visualise our ideas.

Hero

Benefits of Captain 7

How it works

Brand Credibility #1

How it works #2

How it works #3

Addressing customer’s core criteria #1

Addressing customer’s core criteria #2

Success Testimonials

Contact Form

Final Call-to-Action

Footer

Feedback Session

Revisiting content hierarchy and considering content

As we went through several more feedback sessions, we had to progress our sketches into digital wireframes to communicate and share our ideas easily across the team. The feedback session saw us introducing several new sections and re-arranging our information hierarchy into what's more relevant for our customers.

Hero Section

Addressing customer’s core criteria #1

Benefits of Captain 7

Addressing customer’s core criteria #2

Brand Credibility #1

How it works #1

How it works #2

How it works #3

CTA Section

Brand Credibility #2

Contact Form

Final Call-to-Action

Footer

Branding and Content

Gearing up for final delivery phase

Since our higher level goal was to make changes that would allow us to scale the company and product at a faster pace, some of the things we also wanted to reconsider was a new definition to Captain 7’s branding and content strategy.

Branding and Visuals

An emblem of empowerment and inspiration

Building on from the brand guidelines, we centred our design system on the messages of empowerment and inspiration for children, but also remaining clean and professional.

An example is adjusting the previous logo into an emblem as a user feedback session revealed that many first impression of Captain 7 is of a Superhero.

Final Design

Launching our new landing page(s)

At this stage of the project, I was leading the charge of the website’s design output —
‍from building the design system, to the final interactive prototype.

So how did we tick the boxes?

✅ Convince leading educators that boxes are still being ticked and school requirements are met
✅ Support struggling teachers to easily integrate new teaching methods into existing curriculum and study plans
✅ Use Captain 7’s approach to provide students with the highly sought for but missing teachings in schools

Usability Testing 1.0

Good summary but not enough info to convince

Our users appreciated the visual branding, the content copy and the overall flow of the site. However, there were of course still a few grows from the test — two in particular were raised by many:

"The product looks really great but I would love to know more about Captain 7, seeing as how we could possibly be working closely for a while"

"I never knew Design Thinking was used by these companies! Though I'm still not sure what exactly it is even after going through the whole page"

Iterating from feedback

Expanding the scope of MVP

The initial project scope was only a single landing page website, but clearly the testing results has shown that we’ll need more information in more pages. Luckily, we had time to spare. Three new pages were then added as part of the final website.

About Captain 7

(background, mission statement, values)

About humans behind Captain 7

(emphasising Captain 7’s expertise in both education and design industry)

More about Design Thinking

(including more in-depth info about the programme implementation)

The Results

Surpassing goals, and celebrating a successful launch 🎉

At the end of the eventful 2 weeks, we successfully delivered the following deliverables to our client:

1x Initial Research Report

Market Analysis of the education - tech industry and design thinking. 
‍
Competitive Direct & Indirect Analysis of similar services.

1x Final Research Report

Key insights from users, target audience + mindsets, problem statement and product discussion during a facilitated Design Workshop.

2x Design Workshops

Miro Boards, Brainstorming sessions, Product scoping, Business goals, MVP requirements;

and a whooole lot of Post-Its.

1x Branding & Content Strategy

Tone of Voice, Social Strategy, Visual Language, Site Map, User Flows.

Website Experience Journey.
Customer Experience Journey Maps.

1x Final Recommendations Plan

Competitive & Comparative Research
User Research, Branding & Content, Usability Testing Results.

Action Plan and Final Takeaways.

1x Final Stakeholder Presentation

Highlights from Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver stages, Design Systems handover, High Fidelity Prototypes.

Live Responsive Website.

Reflections

When in doubt, look to research 🔎
While brainstorming for the right product offerings, there was difficulty navigating through everyone’s ideas and coming to an agreement. By referring back to research, it ensured that the final solution is well supported, and there’s no hard feelings between everyone.

Understanding your limits 💤
This was a very ambitious project to take on given the amount of time. Naturally, there were plenty of occasions where we had to decide between delivering a better work or getting enough rest. Through this, I’ve learned that a well-rested team would need only an hour for the same task that took a rest-deprived team 5 hours to complete.

Next Steps

Follow up with metrics to measure the success of the design — ‘bounce rates’, ‘click rates’ etc.
Consider the user personas from a bigger scale. Instead of just the individual educators in the school, also consider the different types of schools that could determine the various requirements that Captain 7 would have to consider.
Conduct further testing and A/B tests to further iterate and refine the structure, content and visuals.