2021 Fall Classes Launch
Client
Scope of Work
The Challenge
As the launch of 2021 Fall school year is approaching, Spy Hop is gearing up to launch all of their classes in-person, after almost a year of online programming due to COVID-19. It's also the first session of classes in their brand new, permanent home - the 22,000 sq. ft. Kahlert Youth Media Arts Center. With this new building, Spy Hop is redefining what their role is in Salt Lake City as a community resource. Furthermore, after consulting with students and staff, it became clear that the website user experience was creating tension in how students learn about, explore, and sign up for classes. With these 3 factors in mind, I worked with the Marketing Director to create a marketing campaign that would address all these issues at once.
My Solution
In addressing the website, I started with the landing page. The old site's hero section featured a full-screen sliding banner that communicated current and upcoming events. I decided that with the opening of Spy Hop's first permanent home, the landing page's hero section should instead feature an evergreen photo of the Kahlert Youth Media Arts Center. The would help site visitors immediately associate Spy Hop with the monumental building, help communicate Spy Hop's legacy and authority, and reduce immediate confusion as to who or what Spy Hop is. I relocated and simplified the current events section, and added a horizontal slider of featured classes. Spy Hop's classes have unique and non-descriptive names, so I added a descriptor field to the top of the cards for more context.
Some major problems with the website were the amount of clicks needed to travel from the home page to a class sign up form, and an overwhelming amount of text to read on class descriptions. I mitigated this problem by designing an "Upcoming Classes" page that pulled upcoming class data, with an obvious filter for film, audio, music, and design. I then redesign the "Program Overview" pages and "Individual Class Session" pages, simplifying the way the classes are portrayed and crucial information is communicated. While doing all this, I modernized the aesthetic and created a standardized system for CTAs and micro-interactions, specifically hover states. I wanted to make the website feel simple, painless, modern, and fun.
For outreach and advertising, I created the "No Experience Needed" campaign of posters, printed handouts, and digital assets. This campaign goes back to brand basics and uses the classic CMYK Spy Hop color scheme and targets new students specifically. To connect this campaign to the website changes, I decided to use a QR code on the posters and a small business card-sized handout with minimalist content, for increased curiosity. This QR code brings people to a mobile-only webpage that serves as a shortcut to the upcoming classes, skipping the home page altogether and creating a more efficient pathway for sign ups.
