Dualiza Case study

Published in

Erretres Insights

12 min readFeb 28, 2019

One of the illustrations for the Dualiza website, created by Apéritif Studio.

You can read this post in Spanish here.

Erretres. The Strategic Design Company asked me to explain the work process for the design of the digital product for Dualiza.

Dualiza is a website powered by Bankia, which promotes the FP Dual education programmes and bridges the relationship between the companies and the educational centres. Dualiza helps to grow and strengthen this collaboration, so the education the students receive matches the companies’ needs from new professional profiles.

The team

The project was carried out by the Digital (lead by Rocío Ballesteros) and Strategy teams of Erretres. The Strategic Design Company. The workflow was coordinated by our project manager, a key profile who manages the whole process and communication, including the development of the website. Currently, we are working on website improvements.

The challenge

The challenge was to make Dualiza a distinct website, differentiating it from other information sources about the FP Dual, positioning it as an information referent in the field.

To achieve that, we needed:

Dualiza to transform itself into a community where all actors (educational centres, companies, public administration, researchers, students, etc.) would share their knowledge and experience.
To prioritise relevant and personalised user experience over a more corporative vision, empowering the people, giving them a voice and a tool to promote this new educational model through their experiences.
To generate an information architecture which would maximise the easiness and fluidity of access and process.
To design a tailored graphic system to get closer to the user.

Value proposition

Dualiza identifies the local area needs, the educational centres and companies settled there and builds a tailored programme that could be included in the FP Dual education programme.

Work process

To start

We met the client to get to value the project scale. We interviewed the stakeholders and carried out a heuristic analysis to learn more about their strengths and weaknesses. Here are the conclusions:

They had three different websites. We recommended creating one unique website including all the content (information and calls) and unifying the brand.
We recommended creating an attractive layout inducing the user to stay longer at the website and to consume more content.
We recommended generating participative content by creating blog posts and audiovisual materials featuring the actors of the programme.
We recommended creating a logical content architecture, and a discoverable and SEO oriented website.
We recommended enabling the possibility of managing the project calls directly on the website by creating a private area for administrative management.
We recommended improving the form of contact with the user.
We recommended creating its own visual identity, close to the Bankia’s visual identity.

Some of the heuristic analysis captures.

After the initial analysis, we carried out a Benchmark analysis to evaluate Dualiza competitors, to study their strengths, characteristics and identify design trends working effectively in their context. We discovered that:

The content and tone of voice are very similar. They don’t stand out and don’t offer distinctive value propositions.
There was an opportunity for developing a more emotional tone of voice, differentiating it from other entities, transforming the institutional codes to a more innovative style.
Most contents on the FP Dual are operational information. The content strategy would be a key tool to differentiate it from others and open new ways of creating a real conversation with diverse stakeholders.
We could focus and segment the content depending on the audiences. The personalisation and contextualisation of the contents would be key for this project given the peculiarities of each target audience.
The audiovisual format stands out.

Getting to know the user

We identified two main user groups: the educational centres and the companies. Initially, we thought about including the students in the main user group, but after some interviews with the stakeholders, it became clear that they were not the main target audience of this website, even though we should never forget about them.

We utilised two main tools to get to know the users: interviews and surveys. When doing an interview, you cannot directly ask the interviewee to tell you what they want. Thus, we looked for objective evidence on how their experiences were in order to identify the needs that we could reflect on the new digital design.

What did we want to know?

What were their opinions about the FP Dual? Did they believe in this education method?
What were the deciding factors in introducing the FP Dual in an educational centre and/or in a company? What kind of information did they need?
Did they understand the role Dualiza plays? Have they participated in any of their programmes? How was the experience?
Would it be necessary to create a private area on the website?

One of the days of the process of downloading interviews.

Interview transcription

Once we finished all the interviews and surveys, we started analysing the results in order to look for user’s patterns and consequently offer them the best solution.

We grouped the insights into seven different groups:

To give prestige to the FP Dual in Spain

The FP Dual is not appreciated in Spain.

“The FP Dual has a bad reputation. The initial news coverage about it was not positive.”
“Generally speaking, the FP Dual is associated with teachers having to work a lot.”

Its image is not related to the positive consequences it has in societies.

“If you choose the FP education programmes it seems like you’re dropping out your studies.”

This website could change the FP Dual image in Spain, bringing value to this new education model.

“We want to bring value to the educational centres, the teachers, their work, their commitment, and their abilities… we have to give them a voice.”
“We want to detect interesting and relevant factors during the research phase to bring value and prestige the professional education.”

The Dualiza challenge

The Foundation has a great challenge ahead: positioning itself as a relevant informative actor in the FP Dual field.

“I think the greatest challenge for the Foundation is to get itself known and spread the vision it has on the FP Dual.”
“We want to be a recognisable lighthouse. We want to influence and to articulate.”
“We want to transform the society. To achieve that, we have to be legitimised in our context. Currently, we are not because we’ve only been operating for a year and a half.”

A distinctive value proposition

In addition, this positioning should be differentiated, credible and relevant for Dualiza’s target audiences.

“We create tailored products. We identify the needs of the areas, the centres, and the companies.”

To communicate the role Dualiza plays in the FP Dual as a facilitator and an enhancer of this new educational model.

“We want people to know that we are open, transparent, friendly and that we also make things easier. There must be a being part of Bankia attribute.”
“We want to transform reality. We don’t want to be thinkers, we want to be a catalyst for action.”

A platform by the users

Dualiza should transform itself into a community where the actors (educational centres, companies, the public administrations, researchers, students…) share their knowledge and experience.

“We need a window to talk about what we do.”
“We can show what we do.”

Empowering the people who are part of the FP Dual, giving them a voice so they are the ones spreading this new educational model through their experiences.

“All of us who are learning about the FP Dual would share our findings.”
“Others should speak about the model more than us, the communication must be in the third person.”

And for the users

To facilitate the contact and connection between educational centres and companies

“We need to be put in contact with the educational centres.”
“We have a problem reaching companies.”

To guide the process of implementation and execution of the model through simple operating information.

“The alliance serves as an intermediary. It connects you and advises you, but apart from that you have to get in contact with the educational centres and manage everything.”

To give visibility and voice to the projects

“It would be good for the educational centres to get to know what we do and about our projects.”
“As for companies, it could be interesting to see others’ experiences and have access to formal explanations to clearly understand the whole process.”

A knowledge centre

This new website is defined as a knowledge HUB about the FP Dual. A place where you can find all the news, insights, good practises and operational information, so every individual and institution interested in the FP Dual can find accurate content and answers for their needs.

“In Spain, content about the FP Dual is very dispersed. There is much general information but not many specific ones.”
“There is little research in Spain about the FP programmes. If you don’t have the knowledge you won’t be able to make good decisions.”
“We would like to know how we could innovate working with the companies.”
“It would be very interesting to have content generated by others on the website.”

About the private area

Calls and documentation management

“We would like to manage the calls and documentation through the website.”

Researchers’ area: landing page where the researchers could register themselves and upload their projects.

“We would like the researchers to be able to register so we can know about their profiles, topic of research, etc. and be able to upload and update documentation by themselves.”

Users log in to share their experiences through posts and collaborate while creating content.

“We would like people to be able to publish their contents.”
“We will filter the contents and information before publishing.”

Personas

Creating personas can be used as a tool to helps us design for our users. It shows how they behave, think, what they want to achieve and why.

We created four Personas: the professor, the company tutor, the researcher and the student (even though the student is not a direct target audience, we considered it to be important to represent the students when working on the ideation phase).

Ideation

After the research phase, we put Marta, Carlos, Sergio, and Andrea in the center and we carried out various iterative phases looking for solutions to the specific problems that we found during the research phase and defined possible functionalities.

The users’ main necessities were:

To have the capacity to find general information about the FP Dual programmes.
To learn how to manage and implement the FP Dual programmes.
To download resources for the implementation of this education programmes.
To share the experiences with the actors.
To search for companies and educational centres.
To have the possibility to enroll in the Dualiza programmes through the website.
To search for the documentation about the FP Dual programmes.
To know the events Dualiza is developing by the freelancer community.

Our proposals to help users:

To create an area to explain how to enroll in the FP Dual programmes with segmented and personalised information depending on the user profile (educational centre, companies, and students).
To create an area where we could show the testimonies of the educational centres, companies, and students.
To have a search engine to find educational centres and companies filtered by the freelancer community.
To have an area dedicated to the research about the FP Dual where researchers could participate and share information.
To have an area to publish events related to FP Dual.
To have a private area to facilitate the enrollment on the diverse educational programmes Dualiza offers..

Information architecture

We designed an information architecture proposal based on the necessities we found during the research phase and we validated it with a card sorting exercise with the client.

Card sorting workshop with the Dualiza team.

The final proposal for the menu included seven interconnected content areas:

FP Dual
We explain what the FP Dual is, showing the numbers, advantages, characteristics, and testimonies about this type of educational programmes. All in one unique section so the user can easily find the information needed to learn about the issue.

How to start
We ordered the content of this section by user type so we could explain how each of them could enroll in the FP Dual. We also proposed to create a search engine for educational centres and companies that would be developed in a second development phase.

Stories
Stories are one of the most important areas of this website, and they are spread all over. Also, we created a website page in which you could find them all together.

Programmes
All the information about the programmes and calls would be found in this section. From here, the user can also enroll in diverse programmes.

Agenda
The events section.

Knowledge center
A space to analyse, investigate and debate.

Get to know us
The most corporate area of the website where the user can find information about what Dualiza is and who the team members are.

Private area
This private area serves as a tool to enroll in the programmes and manage the calls. In the second phase, testimonies would also be managed in this section.

Dualiza information architecture. Discontinuous red lines indicate interconnected content between the different sections.

Wireframes

We presented the website wireframes to explain to the client the functionalities of the new website.

BUSCADOR CENTROS

Look & feel

To conceptualise the look & feel of this new website, we worked with the Erretres design team.

We decided to apply a different colour to each of the segments (testimonies, publications, and good practices). Dark blue would be used for educational centres, light blue for companies and orange for students, so that we can clearly and rapidly identify who is talking.

In addition, if the content was not addressed to any segment in particular but rather a general content created by Dualiza, their corporate green color would be applied.

Visual Design

Before starting with the visual design, we iterated working on the wireframes to improve a series of aspects which were not working correctly.

To illustrate the new website, we worked together with Apéritif studio. They developed a series of illustrations matching the new visual identity for Dualiza created by Erretres teams.

Working with the client

We have enjoyed working with Dualiza team a lot. It has been a very beautiful project of which we feel proud of the work process and the result. The communication with the Dualiza team has always been good, easy, and it was a pleasure working with them.