How Prepmedians Built Engaging, Test-Ready Digital Tools Fast

The Client

Prepmedians provides highly engaging ACT and SAT test prep that is affordable, giving students of all backgrounds access to superior test prep methods. Prepmedians improves test scores by creating unique content through sketch comedy, parody, music, and rap.

The Challenge

Test preparation is key to succeeding on the ACT or SAT, but it can be unaffordable or boring for students. Prepmedians’ wanted to create a test preparation tool that would educate in a memorable way, while getting students familiar with the formatting of questions and day-of-test expectations.

Prepmedians came to us with a mission to build a platform that could achieve their goals within 8 weeks.

The Approach

Starting with a design kickoff, LaunchPad Lab and Prepmedians worked together to discuss the features, roadmap, design inspiration, and timeline. Together we created the plan to build Prepmedians into an easy to use platform with each student having a dashboard to track their progress.

Reason Behind the Design

When designing the user experience and visuals for Prepmedians, high schoolers’ love for modern and clean design played a main role. Coupled with being an approachable platform, the use of whimsical background decorations and color palette allows students to escape the feeling that they are in a testing environment. Throughout the site, and namely in the question area and dashboard, brighter greens are used to contrast against a mostly white palette. By designing with a clean approach, the noise of secondary information is calmed down to allow for only the important messages to get across.

The Solution Design

The overall goal when it came to designing Prepmedians was to create a user experience that felt intuitive to students.

• Video and Question Modules: Building familiarity with the styling of questions for tests was a driving factor for individual module design. Having a two-part process of viewing videos and taking a practice test was at the forefront of the application design and was tested to be recognizable to the user as a test.
• Student Dashboard: Housing all of the student’s modules and progress, the dashboard is the main hub within the Prepmedians’ platform to access all videos and questions, past results, and current goals. User flows stem from the dashboard and allow for the student to make decisions based on their goals of where to go within the platform from the dashboard.

The Results

• Client Administrative Portal: Integrated ActiveAdmin to allow the client to manage site content and survey questions.
• Turbolinks: Turbolinks in Rails used to increase the speed of application when navigating between pages.
• Ruby on Rails: Web application framework used to build a complete web application. Provides standard conventions that allow for an increase in team efficiency and quick turnaround to deliver client application within a restricted time window.
• Data Tabs & Analysis: Data collected from the user surveys is displayed in a separate question data tab to show additional calculations performed on the entire data set.
• Postgresql Database: Leveraging the open source data store, Postgresql, allows for more performant access to read data for the map search UX and data science analytics.
• CSV Exports: The data that is presented in Active Admin also allows for exporting to CSVs. This allows for additional data analysis by the client in an external software.