Jacqueline Yarbrough | Content Writer
Brand Creation
Increasing sales by creating a new imprint for a publishing company
Trivium Test Prep is a profitable study guide publishing company that caters to an assortment of standardized test takers. Their top-selling books include nursing tests, high school tests, military tests, and more.
PROJECT NAME
Teacher Certification Imprint Creation
WHAT MY TEAM DID
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UX research
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White board wireframing
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Branding
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Information architecture
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Style guide authorship
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UX design
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Book design (cover and interior)
DATE
Fall 2016
Trivium Test Prep is a study guide publishing company that specializes in standardized test strategy. This means the target audience spans a huge array of people, which can make it challenging to find the target user, buyer, and/or reader. They had a few study guides for teacher certification tests, but they didn’t sell very well compared to other types of guides Trivium offered.
CHALLENGE: There are dozens of teacher certification tests in the United States spanning a myriad of subjects, student ages, learning abilities, and more. Trivium has a solid foundation in study guide publishing – they are a top seller for several standardized tests, however teacher certification study guide sales were lackluster.
SOLUTION: We decided that to sell more teacher certification study guides, we needed to create a new imprint specifically for teacher certification tests.
RESEARCH & ANALYSIS
Trivium is an established publishing company, and as such had years of data at our disposal. They created one imprint aimed at high school students for college entrance testing, but sales were lacking compared to Trivium sales. To make up for that gap, they added other kinds of standardized tests to the catalogue, but sales never took off the way they expected. We hypothesized that the target user for the new imprint was too broad, and thus didn’t really appeal to anyone, resulting in low sales.
We needed to research the competition. We already knew the big names in study guide publishing thanks to Trivium's years in the market, but we wanted to learn as much as possible about teacher certification guides specifically. Below are images and links to the biggest competitors:
A sample of our competition in the teacher certification study guide market
So what could we provide that these other brands aren't providing or can't provide? It was time to focus on the most important part of this whole project – the user.
We each knew a handful of teachers personally, and we agreed that we would talk to them about their experiences studying for their certification tests. We also used social media to find information, as well as Amazon reviews of other teacher certification study guides. We finally synthesized our collective data into the following affinity map:
Analyzing data with an affinity map
Significant themes that were observed include frustration with a “one-size-fits-all” study guide, study guides without any or enough practice tests, and of course the age-old conundrum of “why even buy this at all”?
From here, we could move on to creating our user problem statement and user persona.
USER PROBLEM STATEMENT
& USER PERSONA
I am a 23-year-old substitute teacher in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania looking to become a certified teacher. I majored in something other than education, so I'm overwhelmed with what I don't know about the process of teacher certification.
Meet Alana, our user persona.
From here, we were able to make our user journey map:
Here's Alana's user journey of the study guide buying process.
PROBLEM STATEMENTS
& "HOW MIGHT WE..." STATEMENTS
From our journey map, we defined three clear problems that Alana faces when she tries to complete her user journey:
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Alana is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information, options, and resources. How can she choose between all the seemingly similar study materials?
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The most reputable study materials also cost the most. Alana has a budget to stick to, so she needs to make every penny count. How can she choose a cost-effective and a trustworthy study source?
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If and when Alana finds study materials she enjoys using, she’d want to help other potential educators by recommending what worked for her. How can our study guides be useful to the largest number of would-be teachers so that Alana can confidently and easily make a recommendation?
From these problem statements, we also created three “how-might-we” questions that would help us solve these problems. How Might We…
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… help Alana select the best study guide?
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… help Alana spend as little money as possible while still getting high-quality study materials?
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… create a reliable and memorable study guide for Alana and her cohorts?
BRAINSTORMING
To get started on designing the product, we made a MoSCoW chart with elements we’d discussed as a group:
Prioritizing with a MoSCoW chart
With Altruistic Alana in the forefront of our mind, we dove into creating the branding for our new imprint. Like Alana, we wanted our new imprint to be organized, approachable, helpful, and youthful. We used a mood board to collect our ideas in a visual medium.
Brainstorming with a mood board
We knew from Trivium sales data that study guides with happy-looking people sell best, so we found photos of teachers helping their students in the classroom to reflect our target market. For situations where photos of people aren't appropriate, photos of bright, classroom-related objects and scenes are provided. Muted primary colors and shades of gray composed the palette for the new brand, emanating vibrancy, trustworthiness, and knowledge.
BRANDING
We decided to name the new imprint "Cirrus Test Prep" because we wanted our name to be synonymous with high places, like we all want our test scores to be. Logo design was done in-house shortly after the name was decided, and from there we expanded and diversified our mood board into a Cirrus branded style guide.
Cirrus Test Prep Style Guide
DESIGN
As production manager, I designed both the interior of the books and the cover. Below are low-fidelity sketches (or wireframes) of the interior's first draft.
Above is a spread of low-fidelity wireframes for Cirrus study guides.
I didn't want to finalize the interior of our new imprint until I had a few chapters ready for layout, which took several weeks. In the meantime, we needed a cover template for Cirrus. Designing the cover of our new imprint was a collaborative effort from the entire content team. We used our mood board, style guide, and low-fidelity wireframes to create our completed cover design.
Cirrus Test Prep cover template
Once I had some chapters for layout from Editorial, I was ready to complete the interior design. I wanted actual language to work with while I finalized the graphics, margin sizes, figures, etc. Below is a smattering of Cirrus interior pages.
Above is a slideshow of published interior Cirrus pages.
THE FINAL PRODUCT
In addition to traditional study guides, we also developed and sold practice test books, which was a book of only practice questions and answers, as well as flash card books. We needed these covers to go together as Cirrus Test Prep, but they also needed to stand by themselves.
Published Praxis 5018 study guide and flash card book
We grew the Cirrus catalogue to cover dozens of teacher certification exams. Eighteen months after the first Cirrus book was published, Cirrus sales were almost thirty percent of Trivium's total profits, making it a huge success.
A variety of published Cirrus study guides and flash card books
REFLECTIONS & NEXT STEPS
As more and more standardized tests are done on the computer, users want study materials that reflect this change. Stakeholders unfortunately were not prepared to establish a digital department (other than ebooks) when we were creating the Cirrus books, so we did as much as we could with the resources that we had. I would highly recommend that they significantly increase their investment in online resources.
Thank you for reading this case study.