Instructional Connections

About the Company

Instructional Connections is a unique business with a unique mission. They are the leading provider, if not the only provider, of high-quality instructional support services for college and university online classes.

Headquarters

Dallas, Texas

Industry

Education, Information Technology

Services Provided

Brand Development
Website Design

The Problem

The problem that Instructional Connections faced was that while their service aimed to serve Universities and their students, their branding and website failed to relate to either of those audiences. While the site was functional and concise, the look and feel was outdated.

Their logo presented a separate set of problems. It was a raster graphic, unscalable, and contained too many colors. The old Instructional Connections website, while it was mostly functional, was outdated in its appearance. And that appearance sometimes made the site difficult to navigate.

Project Goals

With a mission in mind, the JSL team had clear direction on how we needed to proceed in order to take the Instructional Connections brand and site from outdated to outstanding.

Updating the Brand

When we first began the process of rebranding Instructional Connections, we were working off the idea that they didn’t want to deviate too far from the original concept of their logo, which featured the image of a globe and a graduation cap.

The new logo option was familiar, yet simplified. And Instructional Connections also liked that the cap was designed in such a way that it was made of three separate shapes, representing the three branches that make up the service model of Instructional Connections – the Universities, the Students, and the Teacher’s Assistants, all working together towards a common goal.

We created a data visualization system that compiled information gathered from questionnaires and reinterpreted that information as visual data. Now, users and students could see their future trajectory rather than hear about it in hypothetical terms. We made information digestible by offering paths in which Smarter Graduate users could dive as deep as they wanted into the details of their choices, with insight and advice being offered along the way.

Throughout the user experience, we used design choices and strategies that would keep users engaged and entertained. By making the user experience a pleasing one, students have more incentive and opportunity to continue exploring multiple options and scenarios for planning out the years ahead of them in a way that feels less like work and more like pleasure.

The Website

We updated the site across three different platforms – desktop, tablet, and mobile.

Content

With the help of JSL’s stellar content and copywriting team, we were able to create functional, digestible content that not only made the point it needed to make, but was also search engine friendly. Nested with keywords and optimized search friendly rhetoric, our team was able to creatively craft the story of Instructional Connections in a way that would resonate with the Universities and Students that they are aiming to serve.

Style

We updated the colors for Instructional Connections so that, while they were still close enough to the original colors to be familiar, we also added a gold color to provide variety and interest. Another addition we added to their website was the use of motion graphics. Motion graphics serve not only as a way to keep users interested, but also function in a way that directs the user through a website and can point them towards the next page or call-to-action.

Call-To-Action Elements

We created buttons, made them larger, and placed them strategically throughout the site to work in conjunction with the content created by our team. Although it might have sufficed to use text on the buttons that simply said “Read More” or other, generic, non-specific labels, this would not have been conducive to our policy of making sure that all aspects of the site complied with ADA accessibility standards.