Educo Website
Designing a Bold + Innovative Marketing Site for an Ed Tech Startup.
The Challenge
Abaraham is the founder and CEO of Educo, an emerging ed-tech startup focused on serving the Caribbean. Through his own experience and research they discovered that the Caribbean education industry was ripe for innovation.
Goals
- Sell partners on the vision
- Provide a way to get involved.
- Educate them on the product.
- Build trust in the team
The Solutions
Bold and innovative: to embody the innovative spirit of the company. Educo is fresh and new, so let’s wear it on our sleeves.
Fun and friendly: To help people think about education differently. Often times people think of education as boring and dreary. We wanted to flip the script.
User Experience
The goal of the website was to tell a compelling story about the product and mission so that people would get involved by investing, partnering, or donating. We broke the website into 4 of primary pages to align with this:
Landing: Offers an executive summary of the mission, the product, and the benefits
Product: Provides a full breakdown of the product and how it works
Team: Introduces the team and their prior experience to build trust and establish credibility
Donation: Allows people to sponsor students as a way to contribute
Visual Design
By helping Encore establish their web presence and educate their clients, we were able to generate an additional 28% in lead conversions.
Montserrat
The strong Montserrat font, material design elements, contrast, gradients, and drop-shadows — all give bold/futuristic vibes. The use of shapes in the header alludes to how the product is at “the bleeding edge.
Bold, but Friendly
Landing
This landing page sells them on the “What” (product) and the “Why” (mission). We start by showing them that the problem is real, unmet by current solutions, but still solvable. Then we show a clear through line to our product and how it makes people’s lives easier. They can easily click to learn more about the product, the mission, or how to get involved.
Selling the Product
The vision was to create a simple and scalable design to show off all the product goodness.
Often times startups will proudly tout each and every feature and tech spec of their product. Which can sometimes be confusing and even annoying. Nobody really cares about your product 😕 they care about making their lives easier and scratching some specific itch.
The headline focuses on the value students get in using the platform. The body text focuses on how the product makes all of that possible. The goal was to take a conversational tone and keep it concise.
The visuals follow a theme of twos, reflected in the column structure and integration of devices/UI. The two-column structure has basically become the go-to visual layout for SAAS/Startup websites.
The blue background element behind the devices provides contrast and symbolizes a “red carpet” of sorts that shows the product in action.
Donation
I began with a competitive audit of all the top US nonprofits to study their storytelling style, sponsorship presentations, and donation package structure.
Emotional imagery was a common thread. You have to touch people’s hearts and show them what their impact could look like. The header image speaks to that by establishing an emotional connection above the fold. The integration of the image, text, and UI feels like the girl is watching your response to the call-to-action. Raises the stakes a little lol
My analysis also revealed it was important to:
1) make it easy to donate on a one-time/monthly basis and
2) provide pre-populated donation levels. This creates a more streamlined experience and allows you to optimize for monthly recurring reven
About
The content for this page was straightforward and the goal was to build trust in the team by sharing the mission and relevant past experience. But I felt I that playing with shapes as a visual element could bring the content to life.
The symmetrical mix of soft colored rectangles accents the key values.
The bouncy abstract background elements make the photos pop off the page. The lines seamlessly connect each accomplishment and milestone. All subtle and relatively simple, but it’s these kind of details that draw you in and make you wanna look a little longer. Every second counts.
