ideation
Notes From The Client
Our first call with Mehr, the founder of OpMath, yielded her visual inspiration for the site design, a rough list of sections and features to be included, and further insight to the company’s mission statement.
Mehr wanted the site to have a “hip, cool/chic aesthetic, since its a Bay Area EdTech startup.” She explained that she wanted the site to stand out from other well-known tutoring companies (such as Kumon and Mathnasium); she envisioned for it to look intriguing and trendy to even teens and young adults.
She elaborated upon her vision for Operation Math with the team, expressing that encouraging kids to de-antagonize math would hopefully fill in the knowledge gaps that she’s currently seeing in later stage STEM education and careers. Mehr is passionate about empowering young students through OpMath.
Mehr’s visual inspirations, including other product websites such as Stripe and Backer, clued me into her affinity for design elements such as soft gradients, communicative heroes, and clear, bold CTAs. I was especially interested in the way Stripe visually enabled long lists of options to be mentally digestable with the pairing of iconography alongside each title.
Design process
Telling a Story: Information Architecture
To begin, the team inspected the list of features that Mehr wanted on the site, and grouped them into similar categories based on the story they told. For example, Mehr’s request for a “step by step” guide to OpMath’s learning process fell into the same category as the call for expanded features of the overall “OpMath experience,” as we discerned that both of these sections detailed information about the company’s product. In dissecting each phrase or list item together, creating similar groups, and crafting communication goals for each group, four main pages emerged as shown below in our final site map.
