Background

Explorify was created by Wellcome and is a free digital resource for teaching primary science. My role while working on Explorify was as the UI designer in charge of all the visual design requirements for the product, including bringing the product in line with WCAG 2.1 requirements.

Explorify was also the first Wellcome product to adopt Wellcome's design system, which I was in charge of.

Why redesign the homepage?

Minus the occasional limited-time promotional banner, the Explorify homepage remained largely unchanged for many years. Over that time, we added new activity types and features and wanted new prospective users to learn about these benefits - we wanted to improve our sales pitch for Explorify.

The main problem with the outgoing homepage design is that it didn't showcase the wide variety of great activities available for teachers to do with their pupils. Instead, only showing three activity cards, with no indication of the purpose of each activity.

The only way teachers could get more information would be to sign up, which is quite a big point of resistance, especially when prospective users are simply trying to learn more without feeling like they need to commit. This highlighted another issue where the homepage wasn't completely communicating one of its most significant selling points, which was that it was completely free!

Old Explorify homepage

Redesigned activity showcase

For the redesign, we wanted to highlight the great activities available to users to give them a better understanding of the different activity types and how they could be used in the classroom.

Users can now get mini previews of four different activity types within the homepage without signing up. They can easily switch between the four categories and interact directly with the activities.

New homepage