Teach Online

As part of Education First’s Global Creative Team, we get the opportunity to act as an in-house agency for our many different EF products. Teach Online, approached us to create a brand identity and a new website. The goal was to grow their online teacher database and increase teacher retention.

The team for designing the website included me as the UX Designer, Lukasz Kulakowski as the UI Designer, and Stefan Hellberg as the project manager.

Part of the project’s success was using the research generated in the exploration phase during the project’s first month. This fed into the brand strategy and acted as waypoints to ensure that we led with a teacher-first approach.

We used the ‘double diamond’ approach as a framework for the project, to align both team members and stakeholders around the current phase of the project. It also proved helpful with keeping to the timeline.

The exercises listed above helped us identify these key pain points for both users and the business.

We reached out to several teachers currently teaching with Teach Online during our user research to learn about their current experiences, challenges, and motivations. One teacher responded by writing a poem to explain why she teaches English online.

We used this information to flesh out our personas, which guided our next few exercises, including the How Might We’s (HMWs) and content mapping.

Although our research covered the teacher’s entire application process and onboarding into Teach Online, our scope was only to redesign the marketing website. This was frustrating, as we had identified many challenges and areas of opportunity throughout the journey, including too many touchpoints and confusing requirements.

Even though we couldn’t tackle the entire flow during this project phase, we still wanted to improve the marketing website and use this opportunity to be more transparent and honest with the teachers about the application process and what it’s like to teach with Teach Online.

Brainstorming the How Might We’s, insights and opportunities, and content mapping helped us get our site map and content strategy.

Historically, the company has relied heavily on long forms for converting leads. However, we learned that teachers could not apply when using their mobile phones as the application form was only desktop-based. This was despite the fact that around 60% of traffic came from mobile devices.

Leading with a mobile-first approach, we created a simple application flow that would be quick to complete and works well both on desktop and mobile devices.

We needed to inform the user about teaching kids or adults while providing them with all that information. Teachers get paid a fixed hourly rate for teaching but different rates for teaching kids or adults. Additionally, the hours and the bonuses for each group also varied.

So we designed a calculator to let the teachers compare their potential earnings and hours available for teaching to help them decide whether to teach kids or adults.

The choice to put the teacher first led to more transparency regarding the pricing and teaching options. By providing the teacher with honest benefits of their teaching choices, teaching kids or adults, we put them in charge of their career decisions.

We conducted remote user tests during the pandemic. We recruited 5 participants who were based in the UK, had a Bachelors Degree and tested on mobile phones. Our key areas of interest were:

1. Overall impression of the website

2. Navigation

3. Understanding teaching requirements

4. Applying online

5. Understanding income potential

See the full brand, UX and UI case studies on Behance and our company website, ef.design. Also, visit the Teach Online website.