Building and digitising a paper-based writing assistant tool for IELTS Australia
We took a dated paper-based training product by IELTS Australia and built an online digital practice and reporting system.
A long-standing client, IELTS Australia came to us early in 2020 to discuss the possibility of adding a paper-based product to their existing WordPress e-commerce solution online.
Quickly seeing the potential to streamline this very manual paper-based product, we quickly scrapped the initial client brief and responded with our own, much to the dislike (but expected) of IELTS Australia.
Digitising a paper-based writing training product for IELTS Australia.
A unique, branded design experience focused on interaction
Getting started on the project we jump straight into interface design. Having designed and built the existing IELTS brand website, we knew we’d hit the ground running with previous design interfaces resources on hand.
A focus of the interface design was to keep the overall look of the website very consistent to the brand website. Customers journey with the product actually starts at the IELTS.com.au website where they purchase the digital product, then get directed to the portal product landing page to log in and access their purchases.
Design in this instance turned towards digitising the paper-based product and focusing on the best user experience to complete each of the product training components.
Getting started on the project we jump straight into interface design. Having designed and built the existing IELTS brand website, we knew we’d hit the ground running with previous design interfaces resources on hand.
IELTS Writing Assist online has been successfully launched in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the Pacific.
“To help people prepare for their IELTS test on a computer, our Australasia team recently got together with test takers, IELTS coaches and customer support teams to build and launch IELTS Writing Assist online. The result is an online, end-to-end product that provides test takers with practice writing tasks and a personalised report from an IELTS coach with detailed feedback on their task response, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, grammar and accuracy.”
– IELTS Australia
Building an online training product using WordPress
Given the regional IELTS Australia website we’ve custom design and built with WordPress, it made sense to continue the tech stack and develop the new learning system in the same manner. We’ve integrated the IELTS Australia website to send customers sales data over to the learning portal so once users purchase a paid product, they are redirected to the learning portal with the relevant credentials needed to create their account and carry out their online learning.
Custom content annotations for marking staff
As part of the Writing assist product, students are asked to complete many written tasks online. Once these completed tasks we’re manually emailed to marking staff to be printed and hand-annotated, becoming a slow and tedious process.
By digitising the staff annotation process, coaches can log into the learning platform and mark each student’s completed work 100% digitally. Leaving comments on everything from spelling to grammatically errors.
Task and marking staff allocation management
With the thousands of submissions to date, we’ve also implemented a custom reporting dashboard for admin staff to help drive the day to day admin tasks need to be completed. This dashboard presents a number of tasks sold, tasks due for completion, an archive of all completed tasks and so on.
“Our customer support admin was previously spending 4 hours a day on administration with paper-based IELTS. Now she spends about 30 mins..”
– IELTS Australia
User email notifications
Developed into the scope of the project from day one was the ability to trigger user based emails to notify users of completed tasks, updates to their task submissions and any other important and relevant information needed to communicate to the student.
Digitising a paper-based writing training product for IELTS Australia. To see more work on IELTS Australia view our more in-depth case study.
