EF English Live is EF’s digital-only English language learning product. With 1000’s of teachers based around the world, they are the largest online English school in the world and offer a premium learning environment.
Myself, my colleague Greg Rorem, our product owner and the VP of marketing worked closely with the marketing and ops teams to define a solution not just focused around KPIs but a tool which they could use to react quickly to KPIs and live data coming in. We built a CMS controlled website which can be used by various EF marketing departments around the world in order to create and customize their own market-specific content.
We designed everything with a modular approach in mind in order to give content creators the flexibility they need when creating pages within the CMS.
One of our main goals was to tell a story about the students and their EF experience in an approachable and human way, as opposed to traditional education platforms where the information is mostly centered on their products and schools instead of their students.
In addition to pages using a modular approach, I had to design various custom pages that looked similar for every market, since they were offering the same information (pages like contact, about us, packages, blog, etc.).
We conducted quick, lightweight “sanity checks” with users along the way to test our initial concepts, flows, and imagery. Once we had the first visual mockups completed, we decided to check the overall look and feel, with particular attention to the images. Still one of our favorite quotes of user feedback to-date, one among 30 participants said, "We all want to be cool people, but nobody wants to be that cool. It looks like a page for recruiting designers and high fashion."
We decided then to refocus our imagery on things being relatable and descriptive of EF, using actual imagery from around EF, by connecting with a staff photographer friend of ours. On subsequent tests, it was clear that this helped the messaging to be far more relatable to people.
