Category: Education
In 2021, more than 80,000 students enrolled in New York City’s public school system were homeless — and the challenges they face getting a decent education are immense. NYS-TEACHS is a program that provides resources to schools and families that address the unique challenges of educating students who live in a shelter or on the street. We created a fully responsive website from design to launch with a focus on making this critical information more accessible to educators, students, and families.
The design focuses on usability and simplicity to mitigate confusion and get users the materials they need as efficiently as possible. To that end, we avoided designs that felt too overly trendy or modern, and instead highlighted resource-finding functionalities like filtering, sorting, and searching.
Front and center on the homepage is a slider directing users to the four most important areas of the site, based on research into what current users were looking for the most. We wanted to use images to help tell the story, but not dominate the design. We made sure the language used was simpler and straightforward, and that there were very clear paths for help, training, and support.
NYS-TEACHS needed a solution that would solve the problems that current users and staff members were having finding, using, and adding new resources. We achieved this by streamlining the front-end while making the back-end much easier to update.
We implemented an organized grid of resource cards, rich with details and filterable by simple category tags. This provided a clean, at-a-glance view of information for a user to digest. Rollovers and other interactions are kept bold and obvious.