The Niche Enrollment Insights Blog is a coveted education resource for higher ed and K12 schools to give trending actionable insights. This blog is written and put together by the B2B marketing team and designed and built by us, the B2B creative team and our front end web developer Sara Coren.
At the start of 2023, the creative team took actionable steps to make needed accessibility and category updates to increase the clarity, navigation and beauty of this blog. We started with labeling the pain points in discovery then began ideation and collaboration in tandem to gain clarity on marketing needs in order to define the design needs.
In Q4 of 2023, we launched the V2 of the blog. Check it out live here.
The most beneficial update for the blog was to define the breakpoints needed for mobile, tablet and desktop so partners were able to read and access all features on any device.
One major pain point for the blog was navigation. Now, partners can navigate through to key categories and explore articles, podcasts and webinars related to those categories.
Second pain point was design hierarchy. It was hard to tell what information was the most important. Now, we have a clear feature card, to lead the partner to the most recent article or survey that would benefit them.
After clicking on one of the category tags at the top of the home page, the user is navigated to the category page. There are cards listed by the posting date that are tagged with that category.
Our biggest design goal was to increase accessibility. We integrated our product design system, Expedite, and integrated hover states, icons, and CTAs. All CTAs have at lease two notations and all covers pass AAA accessibility.
Each article page is now categorized by K12 or higher ed, titled clearly, has an attributor and CTA abilities to help boost email subscribers.
Our partners were getting confused by all the graphics and colors. So we paired the graphics down and noted webinar and podcast cards with simplified icons. It decreases the need to design more unique graphics (increasing workflow efficiency) and increases clarity on the homepage.
Over the year, our team collaborated with marketing and dev to take the existing blog from a grid to a more organized home page thatβs easy to navigate.
This is not the original blog grid, but it was largely similar. The most recent post populated in the top left and you navigate the articles through a paginated scroll at the bottom.
This is the v1 of our blog update. We released this large update in versions to segment the workload and keep progress moving. On V1, we updated the grid with expedite cards to align with product, increased accessibility on type and colors and removed graphics to decrease the detailed workload.
At the start of 2023, creative collaborated with marketing to discover partner feedback and review and ideated design solutions. We collected inspiration from other blogs in the market and capitalized on the design of one ideation to continue the work.