The OPAL Programme was created after a statement: Children in British primary schools spend 20% or 1.4 years of their school attendance in play, and yet most schools have no strategic or values-based approach to play across all ages.

This programme, backed by science and studies that prove better playtime leads to better results, was developed in response to schools' demand for help resolving playtime issues.

The success of the OPAL Programme started spreading from the UK to overseas, and it was time for authentic corporate branding and a solid marketing strategy. This multi-phase project aimed to enhance customer awareness and increase investor engagement by inspiring a more profound curiosity and understanding of the OPAL programme.

The first step was to work on the brand image. The challenge was to create a brand image that reminded of the primary school environment without being too childlike, as the website is primarily destined for a B2B audience (schools, institutes, and investors).

The second step was to conduct a thorough UX audit of the existing website to identify pain points. This was combined with heatmaps to discover user flow breaks. This was essential for defining better storytelling, content repartition, and logical user flow with new navigation.

The third and last step was creating the primary pages' wireframes and designing them accordingly. Brand guidelines were also developed, including new colour schemes, imagery style, and iconography.

UX audit  We immediately noticed the website's lack of storytelling. We could not grasp the program's contents and benefits quickly, and finding a proper explanation of how to onboard as a school was a hassle. Most of the work involved organizing the content using a Who-What-How logic, which also meant creating content that didn't exist yet.

Branding  The branding used graphic codes and fonts that were somewhat outdated. To create a fresher, cleaner, and more modern look, we brightened the colour palette, used an original serif font, and hired a photographer to reshoot the pictures. We also considered using one colour for each section of the website to create a visual pathway (red for About Us, green for the programme contents, and so on).

Onboarding  The existing website provided little guidance, so the onboarding had to be done using a cumbersome form that was difficult to find and complete. Instead, we created a step-by-step form that was not overwhelming and enabled OPAL to collect as much information as possible on the prospect.

UI Design We added lots of white space to create an agreeable user experience on every page and used colourful, rounded CTAs that were easy to find. We integrated subtle animations with a fade-in fade-out effect to guide the user's gaze when reading each page. With accessibility in mind, we took careful care of the contrast and font size and made the navigation easy to handle, even for people who are not tech-savvy.