Woolworths wanted to bring their Making The Difference educational program online during the Covid pandemic. The platform needed to reach schools with limited resources and provide teachers and students with easy access to health and life skills content.

My role:

For over a decade, the Woolworths Making The Difference (MTD) educational programme has been making valuable educational resources and learning opportunities available to thousands of schools participating in their Woolworths Educational Programmes.

• Conducted extensive user research with teachers to understand their challenges
• Helped define accessibility goals and information structure
• Created a brand aligned component library used by Woolworths after the project
• Worked closely with stakeholders to align content and design

The challenge: Accessibility to all

For years the MTD programme has only ever offered their educational services to schools who are able to host guest educators to come and speak to the students in person. The educators have been providing important information on health, exercise, nutrition and life skills for years, typically to rural schools across the country.

Due to South Africa’s strict Covid laws between 2020 and 2022 however, it became impossible to provide these lessons to students as many of the schools closed. Adding to the accessibility challenge was the fact that most of these schools and students have very few computer resources or even access to the internet. During this time, teachers were driving from home to home, delivering printed out work packs to students in an attempt to keep up with the school curriculums.

We were challenged to create a platform that would help get these valuable educational resources to the teachers and students so that they would still be able to receive their MTD lessons alongside their school work.

Our high level goals were to:

• Make it accessible and easy to use for everyone, everywhere.
• Give teachers the opportunity to bolster their curriculum content with additional information provided by the MTD program
• Create a platform for deeper engagement, not just for students, but parents too.

Process and outcomes

Interviewed over 20 users remotely to inform design decisions. Developed a detailed component library to speed up the design phase. Collaborated with stakeholders and senior leadership to ensure brand alignment and delivery within tight timelines. In the end, we were able to deliver a finished product that met all the needs of the MTD team and the stakeholders.