Creative learners are the arty people among us. They are free spirits managing their 9-5 jobs but are dreaming of a life where they do what they love and get paid for it. They are ready to make the leap but aren't sure exactly how to make that happen.
They are people who love to learn new things. They are photographers, musicians, crafters and graphic designers looking to hone thier skills and grow their businesses.
Creative learners are visual, optimistic people who get bogged down by too many choices and lots of reading. They learn best by being told and shown. They like to learn alongside others and feel part of a community.
Creative Live is a startup that creates long form educational video courses for people in creative fields. Courses touch all aspects of a creative's career- from techniques and software to sales and marketing. Users can watch classes free when they are broadcast or purchase any time access.
I worked at Creative Live for over a year, redesigning their website and working on features like the calendar, mobile app and video classroom.
Make designs that are intuitive and inspiring for creative learners.
Simple navigation and new brand made creative people feel at home.
A list-style calendar let users easily find upcoming classes of interest
An app simplified watching classes on the go and matched website visuals
An immersive classroom gave users a place to focus and interact
Users of the old site said that they had trouble understanding what the company could do for them. They did not know that there was a live class happening then that they could watch for free. They also had trouble comprehending the videos on the class page.
With the redesign, I started by simplifying the navigation to allow for less reading. I incorporated behind the scenes photos into the home page that showed what Creative Live did, which reinforced the text. Because the majority of Creative Live's audience are females 25-40, I designed the pages to appeal to them and chose a complementary font that had a friendly handwriting feel.
Instead of having one highlight color, I assigned colors to each channel to allow the user to quickly remember the one they were most interested in. I chose colors that worked well together, were readable, and followed their general association. Together they had a ‘tv bar’ effect.
On catalog pages I created a simple filtering mechanism.
For the calendar, we ran tests to see what users needed and found that a list layout was optimal.
For the class pages, I kept the videos above the fold for ease of browsing.
The classroom was designed to be an immersive experience that allowed users to easily focus and interact with the instructor.
The mobile app coordinated with the site and was optimized for a user watching classes on the go.
