Atomi is an edu-tech company known for providing high-quality, engaging online learning resources. They specialise in creating video lessons, accompanied by interactive quizzes and comprehensive study materials, targeting secondary school students. Their platform is designed to supplement traditional classroom learning, offering a diverse range of subjects that align with school curricula.
In 2016, I joined Atomi to manage the brand and marketing design function alongside the founding product designer. My responsibilities spanned across all areas of design but my proudest achievement would have to be overhauling the video production process to enhance the learning experience and product at large.
Atomi's videos are concisely crafted to make complex topics easily understandable, often featuring animations and visual aids to enhance learning. My goal was to make the video learning experience more accessible and engaging, leveraging technology to cater to different learning styles and needs. While the video lesson scripts were of a very high calibre, adhoc approaches were used to design the visual graphics and animations, leading to vastly inconsistent experiences and lengthy production timeframes.
My objectives were to:
Improve the quality and brand consistency of the lesson design and visual learning experience.
Develop and implement a scalable onboarding process, training materials and design resources to support the rapidly growing team of content designers.
Simplify the production process to improve production efficiency at large.
Over six months, I systematically cut production times in half by refining and standardising the video production process into bite-size training modules for self-guided learning. Working closely with the Director of Operations, I defined content and design principles tailored to video format to level up the video output. Using these guidelines, I also ran design workshops to teach new content creators about best-practice design principles and accessible design.
When I joined Atomi, the video brand was very disjointed with Atomi’s primary brand expression and app experience. This was due in large part to the content creation team lacking the required guidelines and design training. My goal was to educate the team to champion good design and become proud ambassadors of our video brand.
I got stuck in by establishing a brand identity suitable for video format and visual learning. Then developed brand guidelines, illustration assets, design templates, and training resources to better equip the team.
Atomi also committed to comply with AA standard contrast ratios to support usability in the product. I reworked the app’s primary colour palette, and fleshed out an extended palette to ensure sufficient colour contrasts for users with impaired vision can use the videos and app interface.
Over the years, I designed a handful of product explainer and promotional videos to be used in advertising campaigns to attract new website visitors, and help set expectations during product onboarding. I saw all motion projects through from start to finish, including; copywriting, story-boarding, art-direction, filming, editing, and motion graphics.
One of my favourite projects was this adrenaline-pumping animation aimed at building hype around Atomi's new platform release. The team initially hoped to outsource this but I volunteered to give it a go. The video was so well received that I was asked to create more adaptations for long and short form video formats tailored to our teacher and school audiences.
Every month, I designed and implemented social media ad campaigns to attract new website visitors and nurture leads. This involved setting up AB tests in Facebook Ads Manager with image and copy variables to test my hypotheses on how to improve conversion.
Early on I observed that whilst engaging, our top of funnel ads were too vague and didn't target users far enough down the buying funnel. The most impactful insight was that images that explicitly show or explain the product convert much better, as do those that include a photo of the lesson designers.
I shifted to showcasing the app interface to clearly communicate the expectations of the product across all marketing material. And put the lesson designers at the centre of Atomi's brand expression to keep it feeling human, relatable and fun!
