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Technology
Expertise
If you can make it here…
New York Penn Station and Newark Penn Station may sound alike, but they’re miles—and a state—apart. Meeting someone at the Met? That could be the museum or the opera. Seeing a concert at Madison Square Garden? Don’t go to Madison Square.
Getting around New York City—its five boroughs, 27 subway lines, and 300-some bus lines—is hard enough for locals. Imagine trying it if you couldn’t speak English.
Enter Literacy Partners, a nonprofit whose mission is to improve English-language skills among the city’s immigrant and low-income populations. We’d already worked with Literacy Partners on their annual Subway Reads campaign before they approached us to work on a new initiative called Learn English. The project required expertise in everything from strategy and UX to visual design and development. Just our kind of thing.
Plan of ATTCK
We kicked off the project with a workshop to determine the story our clients wanted to tell. They had plenty of great content, including an award-winning video series produced with the City of New York, but they weren’t sure how to present it. They also wanted to draw attention to their language courses and provide interested students with the information needed to enroll. The finished website was to serve as a central point for the organization’s media and educational projects, consolidating content in an engaging and intuitive way for users at all levels of English literacy.
Language in motion
The last thing Literacy Partners (and we) wanted was for their website to feel “government.” Inviting and fun was more like it. To appeal to all of the website’s visitors—at all levels of literacy—we created custom icons and then made them pop through animations achieved with Adobe After Effects.
Good clips
We knew Literacy Partners’ extensive video content deserved pride of place, so we positioned Media Projects prominently in the website’s navigation bar. Then we devised a system to categorize the videos by subject: education, finances, health, jobs, and everyday language. By selecting any of the options, users see only the content best suited to them. Looking toward future development, we included the capacity for other features like interactive assessments and other learning resources.
Talk the talk
For those in search of in-person learning opportunities, the website’s Find a Class feature offers up-to-date listings of locations where three different types of classes are offered: adult literacy, English for parents, and “We Speak NYC.” The locations, which can be filtered by class type, are then displayed on an interactive map, simplifying the process for students whose English-language skills are limited.
IN THE PRESS
Literacy Partners, NYC’s premier education nonprofit… takes a two-generation approach to the issue of education, providing low-income and immigrant parents in New York City with free classes to develop the literacy and language skills they need to succeed in today’s world.
For goodness’ sake
One of our goals at ATTCK is to support businesses that inspire us, and we take all the more pride in our work when it helps those who are underserved. Now Literacy Partners has a smart, engaging platform to share its offerings with those who need them most. That, in plain English, means success.
Credits
Producers
Gary Gertz
Chris Oz
Dennis Plucinik
Developer
Oka Tai-Lee
Designers
Karen Chow
Masahiro Naruse