Insight
It is surprising that a website to teach women’s history did not exist until 2018. As a historical, rather than political institution, with a sterling reputation, N-YHS is uniquely positioned to deliver that content.
With a modest budget, the website relied on solid, thoughtful design execution. N-YHS had the luxury of having no precedent or competitor. As such, the website is posed to set a new design standard for any history teaching websites that follow and provide a solid foundation from which to build new experiences of even greater complexity, as more time and budget allow.
Idea
An intuitive, modern, responsive website and design system, that can easily be used by educators on-the- go, right from launch, yet evolve over years and be maintained by N-YHS.
A site that would not be fully populated until 2020, called for short, medium and long-term strategies.
The team created an easily extensible system that would appear functionally complete on launch, and be intuitive to use by busy educators immediately, while encouraging them to return to browse through content when they had time, and keep returning as units are published.
The site strikes a balance between delivering a deep well of content while maintaining top-line accessibility. User data offers insights previously unavailable to N-YHS.
UX
1. The structure and entire scope of the curriculum is visible from the navigation. It is clear what units are available and when. Units are color coded for ease of navigation. The framework allows NYHS to seamlessly integrate remaining content over 3 years.
2. Intelligent keyword search and filtering functionality is extensive yet logical, easy to use. Users can navigate content through passive guidance.
3. Complex content is organized and presented in a visually clear and distinct manner, cross-referenced and hyperlinked.
4. Provide extensive printing options for teachers to customize and integrate resources easily into their lessons.
Impact
Enable the client to deliver a world- class, first-in-kind teaching resource that fills a large gap in American education today, particularly in STEAM fields.
WAMS meets the needs of American educators at a critical point in history. The historical backdrop to the launch — the Women’s March, MeToo movement, etc. — provided unexpected urgency and poignancy to this initiative. WAMS is not only a useful, well-conceived and designed site, but a necessary one. The website allows women’s history to be framed in a much broader historical context than ever before, and as part of an on-going continuum.
N-YHS is able to effectively reach an influential audience, distribute a wealth of scholarly information, and illuminate young minds.
Tech
1. Pages were indexed with the appropriate years and tagged with categories and filters in the back-end. They can be called when specific filters such as Date Range and /or Region are activated in search.
2. The Avada Theme applied to the CMS allowed for the creation of template pages and several plug-ins responsible for search functionality, tagging, SEO, print, and custom menus.
Within the CMS, content boxes were designed to scale on either a desktop or mobile device. The simplicity of the editing procedure allows NYHS to make any desired changes to their site after hand-off.
3. Curriculum dedicated pages were converted into printable resources for teachers and students. Images print full- size and content is styled.