Client
ComAgUAS
Dates
Complete in less than a week
in July, 2018
Services
Visual Design, Front-End Development, Content Strategy
Project Overview
Following a major influx in the drone aircraft industry and the increased need for regulated safe piloting around the general public, the FAA created a new rule (FAA Part 107) requiring all commercial drone operators to achieve Remote Pilot in Command certification. ComAgUAS, already a pioneer in the commercial drone industry, saw this as an opportunity to create an online training prep curriculum known as DroneStart.
ComAgUAS, had chose the company that I was working for at the time, CD2 Learning, as the LMS (Learning Management System) of choice. We helped get them quickly up and running as we helped developed their needs courses. However, there was no plan for how they would market and communicate the course offerings for DroneStart and that is when I was asked to help.This was an issue that we saw from time to time. The owners of CD2 Learning were quite involved in the local investment community and have helped a few startups in similar situations. Since this has become sort of a repetitive opportunity for us, I had involved a system to expedite such sites as when these opportunities came, they were usually thrusted into my schedule right in front of the many UX needs of the LMS.
Process
I started this project by reading and understanding exactly what new FAA rule was and then went right into understanding the course offering the client had completed up to that point. After that I did a competitive analysis to determine if there were others in this space that already had, and what they were offering, and I figured out how DroneStart could be just as competitive. After that I started outlining the items the site needed to speak to both verbally and visually. We then moved to wire framing these into sections and ran it by the business owners involved, to craft the main points of communication. We used their feedback to start hashing out sections and provide the messaging that would go along with it. Then I leveraged our in house copy writer to get the copy just right as we moved from rough wireframes into the high fidelity layout.
For this site I made quite a few additional improvements to my template. First was the use of video as a main hero section. We learned in our research that many people that worked in certain areas, like real estate videography, didn't know about other opportunities, such as using drones to check smoke stacks, communication towers and modern electric windmills. Video was ideal in easily expressing that there were other opportunities to in turn, encourage them to make the small investment into the required certification. I also implemented a navigation anchoring system that launches users directly to sections and highlights the fixed navigation relevant anchor. Other than those changes this was quite a quick build and the template changes help turn out many more of these small one page websites in just a few days.