Nothing common about it

Expeditionary Learning is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of teachers and students by transforming schools from the inside out. By providing curriculum that works, Expeditionary Learning has improved common core curriculum for over 18 years.

A recent overhaul of the New York State common core requirements prompted Expeditionary Learning to create a mobile-friendly online experience to make common core curriculum more easily available for teachers in an easy-to-use intuitive interface.

What they needed

• Mobile-friendly experience designed to be accessed anytime, anywhere.
• Hierarchical display of information for intuitive content discovery.
• An editor-friendly interface for our client to continue to expand on their content offering.
• And all needs to be accomplished in a 4 week timeline!

Strategic partnership

We partnered with Three Furies for content strategy and design, allowing us to focus on solutions architecture and development. We leveraged in-browser design and rapid prototyping techniques to collaborate on the visual design. These methods allowed us to iterate and quickly tackle responsive design hurdles that saved valuable development time in the end.

Adding prototypes to our process

We also worked with Starting Now to build an HTML prototype and style guide. The style guide allowed us to define elements in the browser immediately, such as the grid system, basic typography and common page layouts.

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“HTML prototypes cut out a lot of the translation from static comp to site.”

—Adam, Design collaborator

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With this new tool in hand, we were able to incorporate the designed layouts into the Drupal site much more quickly—we already had a working frontend prototype! Working ahead on the design allowed our development team to keep building out the site without slowing down for design revisions.

Take the online style guide for a spin

Flexible solutions for flexible content

Content discovery and development had to happen concurrently to meet the aggressive deadline, making it difficult to account for all the content that needed to be migrated and created. We developed a product that was flexible enough to account for any content variable, enabling our client to add content as it was discovered without compromising the design, layout, or functionality of the site.

Multiple editors and rich media? No problem!

The site needed to be updated by multiple editors uploading a variety of rich media, but many of the content editors had no prior web content management experience. Luckily, we’re no strangers to building easy-to-use, editor friendly systems. We simplified the content editing user experience and made it as easy as possible for content editors to create pages for the site.

Our users say it best

“I love how clear and clean it is!”

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“I didn’t feel overwhelmed the way I usually do with teaching websites.”

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“I ran a modified tuning protocol with a team of about 12 volunteer teachers … I needed to pass on the collective sigh of delight at the ease and access of ‘digestible chunks’ of the curriculum. One teacher exclaimed, 'now THIS is something I can work with.’”

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