Website Redesign Case Study

Background:

We created a real design company called Zixo Designs that operates within the four walls of our high school and the students were off and running with our very first client of the school year.

As the teacher, I wanted the students to be able to receive the money they earned at Zixo at the end of the year in the form of college scholarships.  2023-24 was the year to make that leap!

One of our very first clients of the year was our very own on-campus Center for Excellence (CFE),  a training facility that offers workshops about PBL and other cutting edge educational concepts to teachers and administrators from all over the country and the world. The trainings reach about 400 leaders and educators from 7 different countries every year including the U.S.,  Vietnam, Ireland, China, Israel and many others. In these trainings, educators often visit classrooms, speak to students and teachers on panels, and observe PBL in action.  It's a win-win, in that students get the opportunity to speak with adults about what they are learning and practice their own leadership skills while our visitors get an in depth understanding of what PBL looks like on a practical level.

Problem:

The director of the program, Aaron Eisberg felt that the website used to promote the CFE's offerings could use a bit of design attention.  He also had a strong desire to showcase student work throughout the website, because student-led learning and real-world projects are at the heart of what make PBL so effective.  ​

Mr. Eisberg came to speak with the students about what he needed, what budget he had available and a desire to know where the students felt they could improve the site.  The designers started with analysis of the website, looking for places where visual clarity could be tightened up, places where more student representation via photos and videos might be warranted, and where the overall look of the website might be improved. 

Process:

​Students went through a resume-writing/interview/hiring process and were hired into specific roles on teams such as creative directors, sales people, PR and marketing, and junior, mid-level and senior level designers.  Each team chose one portion of the website, analyzed what could be improved and then the team leaders synthesized all of that into a comprehensive proposal for the redo of the website. 

​Before beginning to work in teams, each team member introduced themselves to their group and talked about what skills they already had and were good at, where they needed extra support and what that support might look like.  They decided ahead of time what they would do when they encountered conflict and how their team would make decisions. Our Product Manager headed up the whole class and worked with team leaders to establish deadlines and expectations for each team.

Because every team was working on a different part of the website doing different tasks, we used an Agile Project management tool called Sprint boards/meetings to keep track of tasks and who was working on them. Each team had their own sprint boards, decided their own tasks and deadlines and tracked their progress during stand-up meetings at the beginning of every class.

As the teacher, I could look at a sprint board and see, very quickly, which teams or individuals needed extra support from me in form of 1:1 coaching, or a conversation with the team leader on how to work with an individual learner.  This way of learning and coaching is a powerful way to teach, support, and troubleshoot collaboration skills in a way that allows for mistakes to be made and learned from. 

Solutions

We planned a mid-project check in with Mr. Eisberg to show him the first iteration of the work for the website. There happened to be a study tour of teachers from Ireland here on campus that day, so they sat in on the meeting as well, as observers. Each team leader presented the work to the client while the Operations team took notes on the feedback Mrs. Eisberg gave.  That document was then shared with the entire group and final changes were made to the website. 

Students created new icons for workshop offerings that provided clearer visuals for website visitors.  They created more compelling video for the banner of each main page that showed students in action learning at New Tech.  They used slow motion shots of entering the building with the students to create a more inviting sense of exploring the website.  They updated the blog photos to better reflect the content and show more student faces instead of stock images.  In addition, they provided a stockpile of photos for future blog posts so Mr. Eisberg could have enough images to keep a consistent visual look and feel.  And lastly, they redesigned all the buttons on the site to be more uniform and round and friendly. ​

We did have one students who acted as the webmaster and implemented those changes on the wordpress website for Mrs. Eisberg.  The webmaster was responsible for following up with any team members who needed to make changes to their design assets based on the criteria the webmaster had chose.  So, things like size of documents, file types, correct fonts and colors were all decided by the team leaders as a group, which they then communicated to their team members. The webmaster made sure that everything remained consistent for the overall look of the website 

In all of this, as the teacher, I remained the coach on the side. I had individual meetings with certain team leaders as needed to make sure that we presented a professional front.  I did a lot of work with the Sales and Marketing team to make sure that the contract was correct, the emails to the client were professional and timely and that communications were clear and useful.  The sales team learned about how to follow-up, when, where and how to request the funds to pay for the project, how to create invoices and more.  In all of this, I insisted that the students do all of the communications with the client.  

"We presented the design team with a challenge of making sure that the icons on our website are authentic to the work we do here with students. Our goal was to celebrate their work and provide multiple revisions to get the work that we needed on our website. We are grateful for their efforts and they were great to work with, we are looking forward to next steps with the team!" -Aaron Eisberg

Suggested next steps for the client were made by the students.  Some future projects might include creating social media content for future promotion of the CFE. 

Zixo is excited to continue helping businesses to succeed online through powerful and clear visual communication.