Advaya – Bruno Dias

Designing an education ecosystem that evolves with the times and the people.

INTRO

It's not everyday you get a chance to tap into a product or service with the potential to touch a large number of people's lives in a way that invites profound transformation. Not that I haven't had that chance previously, but not quite in the same way. During the past 20 years I've had the opportunity to shape solutions for very big names in distinctive industry niches, but this was definitely a first - the opportunity to work on an education platform that tackles subjects from a very alternative and inspiring way.

What is Advaya? As it says on their website, "Advaya is a global platform for alternative education and transformative experiences that sits at the intersection of Ecology, Wellbeing and Spirituality to link inner transformation with outer change. Advaya aims to build a community of change-makers through radical regeneration and joyful revolution.

Up to this moment, Advaya have been doing this community building and education via a mix of different tools that in their view haven't allowed for a very efficient management of the whole process. They also insisted that this same diluted user experience was not what they imagined from a brand experience perspective. The fact is that like so many other businesses, they've started very small and slowly evolved in a very organic way from year to year and, when COVID happened everything changed. They realized they had to scale and do this in a fashion that would allow to bring a new life to Advaya.

GOAL

To redesign Advayas product/service offer from the ground up. To do this in a way that alows for the offer to grow in a sustainable fashion from a content management perspective while adding as much impact and value as possible to their community.

PROCESS

The relation with Advaya started with a series of consulting sessions that were quite organic per say. Usually I would conduct discovery process but this time there wasn't enough time/budget to go that way. Nevertheless, through these sessions I was able to gather enough info to grasp what the client was looking for. They provided me with a brief that clearly stated where they have been, where they were at and, most importantly, where they wanted to move ahead with Advaya.

"Our aim is to create a globally renowned, high quality platform for transformative education."

In a nutshell, here's what the client was looking for:

To refine/evolve our branding
To redesign the "Front of House" website
To create a On-Demand course platform
To research and define a membership structure
To create a User Experience that ensures the best engagement.

We also talked about their content (courses, events, artciles, videos and podcasts) and the way they were envisioning to allow users to access these things.

It was easy to understand what kind of learning ecosystem experience the client had in mind for the end users. The task in hand was big and many questions started arising but the main one being:

What technology do we need to deliver the solution while keeping future scalability and interoperability at premium?

Tech Research
So we delved into an intensive tech discovery process by examining what options were available and what each one of them would mean to execute Advaya's new vision and product. These were the things we were looking for:

To create a content hub for the experience (hosting system)
A system that allows to store Advayas' course, event, articles, video and podcast education content in one place.
To allow the best acess to the experience (accessibility)
Provide a way to access the content via memberships (annual, monthly, etc..) and single product access and do this in different payment modalities (one-time only, instalments, discounts and so on..)
To design the experience for our end-users (customizable)
To be able to catter for all different use-cases and deliver a top-notch learning experience like no other in our market niche.

When looking around the available options these were the results we came up with:

It was clear that if we wanted to recreate what Advaya would look like in a solid and professional way we had to go as custom as possible with our build. Being dependent on a 3rd party platform (such as Teachable or Kajabi) or development framework (such as Wordpress) that would restrict the development of the experience in a near future would mean having to redo everything again at some point not far ahead.

In the end I was able to find a team the we felt confident to go with in being our development partner with the following choices on the technology:

Firebase for static hosting
Digital Ocean for content hosting
Chargebee for user account & profile handling/subscription
Stripe as a payment gateway
Mailer Lite for mailing lists & marketing campaigns
Mailgun for contacts forms and automatted comms

User Experience
We knew we wanted to build the next level learning platform so we started by designing the architecture of experience we wanted to give to our users. We got the first draft of the site map which we kept revisiting along the way and ended up with the following.

Advaya Site Map

User Experience
We knew we wanted to build the next level learning platform so we started by designing the architecture of experience we wanted to give to our users. We got the first draft of the site map which we kept revisiting along the way and ended up with the following.

Account Creation Flow

Account Login Flow

Account Upgrade/Downgrade Flow

Courses & Events Access Flow

Account Cancellation Flow

User Experience (80 wireframes)

Homepage: Logged Out

Homepage: Logged In

Courses Landing Page (Logged In)

Advaya-Phase-1-04_Courses-Landing-Logged-In@2x

Course Page: Continue Course (Logged In)

Advaya-Phase-1-07_Course-Page-About-Logged-In-Continue-@2x

Watch Landing Page (Logged Out)

Watch Page (Logged Out)

Interests: Topic Page (Logged Out)

Interests: Speakers (Logged Out)

Account Creation: Become a Member (Logged Out)

Account Creation: Review Order (Logged Out)

Account Creation: Review Order (Logged Out)

Account Settings: Login Information

Account Settings: Privacy Settings

Account Settings: Purchases

Registration: As a Member (Courses+)

Single Purchase: Event Purchase

Registration-Single-Select-Tickets@2xamended

My Profile: View Default

My Profile: My Courses

My Profile: My Favourites

Advaya About Page

Advaya Team Page

RESULTS

Bringing all the above together and making the sum of it all bigger than each one of its parts represented such a great reward. Above all it was very rewarding to see the a client that could now be perceived in a way that was aligned to their most intrinsic disruptive nature.