TEXAS EDUCATION AGENCY: STAAR TEST WEBSITE AND REBRANDING
Our assignment
The Texas Education Agency was embarking in a huge undertaking – launching a newly designed STAAR Report Card that greatly simplified the way parents viewed their children’s standardized test results. The agency wanted to take this even further by giving parents a place online where they could learn more about the STAAR test and dive deeply into their child’s results. At the time, the TEA only had an administrative site for educators, but knew they needed to better serve their parent audience.
Putting our digital expertise to the test
The TEA needed to create a user-friendly site where parents login to see their child’s test results that complemented the ease and simplicity of their newly designed STAAR Report Card. Steel worked with them to:
- Develop, create, design, and program in less than 2 months
- See evidence that users love it. The goal was to gain support and understanding for both the test and the TEA
- Deliver site traffic of more than 775,000 unique users 1 month post launch
- Achieve a conversion rate of 62% for parents logging in to the site
CLIENT:
RESULTS:
62
Conversion Rate Achieved
775
Unique Website Users in 1 Month
Here’s how we did it
Steel set out to design, develop, and create highly interactive content within the website. The goal was to make it an easy-to-use, welcoming learning center for parents of Texas students taking the standardized test. While the site served all testing students between grades 3-12, our primary focus was on grades 3-8. To start the simplification process, we reduced site architecture to 6 key areas: understanding your child’s score, about the test, how to help your child prepare, literacy and lexiles, FAQs, and a prominent login.
Once the key structure was determined for the site, we worked with our client to outline a series of explainer videos covering the most relevant topics of concern for parents. The site was created to be responsive, making the videos quick and easily accessible tutorials explaining what the STAAR test is, why it’s necessary, suggestions to helping your child prepare for the test and an in-depth overview of how to read the new STAAR Report Card.
With the new STAAR Report Card set to deliver to parents in just a couple of months, we worked simultaneously on the design of the site and video development. Our team leveraged an existing cartoon character created by the Texas Education Agency named Stevie for a starring role as the mascot for the STAAR Test. We approached the site implementation in a waterfall manner, designing pages, passing them to developers, and designing the others to follow.
We were able to design and develop the site in the required time, while also producing the videos and a few Spanish assets to accompany them as well!
Results
Within the 1st month we saw high adoption rates and achieved the following results:
- Conversion rate of 62% on the site for parents logging in
- Client reached 24% of goal for logins within the 1st month of the site being live
- Site traffic for the brand new site was more than 775,000 1 month post launch
- Average time on site was more than 4 minutes – indicating people are absorbing the content and watching videos to learn more
