Para Aprender is an online education platform which offers courses on languages, college admission preparation and professional advice.
The project was about one year old when the product owner briefed new requirements to improve the experience and to adapt new content. We then decided that it would be more beneficial at that point to do a complete redesign instead of patching up the old product.
Restructuring from scratch
The new requirements for the product included new types of media to be offered (audio and video), improving quizzes and making room in the UI to showcase new courses we’d have in partnership with famous experts in topics such as languages, finances and entrepreneurship.
The first version of the website had everything in one page, which not only was overwhelming but also took a lot of the user’s mobile bandwidth.
The new structure now focussed in a “lesson of the day”, as a starting point for all the media available (now in a media gallery) and the other lessons.
It was also relevant in the project that by decentralising the content and creating media galleries, we created a navigation without any dead ends.
Visual design
In this project, the use of colour didn’t have purely an aesthetic or branding purpose – they acted as an important orientation element, especially if the user was enrolled in more than one course, because there are context where the courses are seen together.
We colour-coded each course, so these colours should be consistent but still different enough to distinguish the courses.
The design also aimed for legibility considering contexts where the text was on white or coloured background.
