Edumatch.com

Quick Overview

Edumatch.com offers the ability to buy educational software that matches each state's curriculum and each educator's teaching style. Cambridge Development Labs created Edumatch.com to provide a comprehensive resource to access software products from dozens of publishers, and to offer free downloads, publishers' specials, new products and reviews, funding updates and a forum. They needed an extremely user-friendly interface to access and buy products from a complex database that features search-and-save capabilities and e-commerce functionality.

Edumatch.com was a project that was almost two years in the making, and it involved a large number of aspects from online presentation and applications to backend integration and user-friendly online administration. Below is a quick overview of what the PixelBrick/Ceonex solution provided to Edumatch.com:

• Animated company mascot as site guide with artificially intelligent responses to user actions.
• Completely secure (SSL) connections for all transactions.
• Animated mascot e-mail campaigns resulting in up to 30% response rate.
• Full point-and-click online administration capabilities allowing update and modifications to every aspect of the site and its content by Edumatch.com staff.
• Ability to create, "on the fly," new affiliate entrances, bonus codes and discount codes with start/end date, etc.
• Highly advanced e-commerce module with four ways to check out in order to cut down on traditional educational industry bureaucracy.
• Large scale, fast response search application featuring:
  • One screen, point-and-click searching with virtually unlimited parameters and combinations over more than 15,000 possible matrixed software title matches
  • Fully platform- and browser-independent system.
  • All parameters savable for later use within the same visit or between visits.
  • Ability to e-mail any saved search.
• Interactive educational community section for users to interact with the site on a variety of levels.
• Ability for the user to save virtually any settings, including an unlimited number of product searches, results lists, shopping carts, purchase orders, requisition forms, and more.
• Ability to e-mail any form of checkout and search information to principal or district buyer for final approval of purchase or other collaboration.

Target Audience

Elementary and high school teachers, school district buyers and principals who have minimal internet experience and who are restricted, through their schools, to a certain platform and browser version.

Details

It is not feasible to describe every aspect of a two-year project in detail, but you can find information below on the most complex and advanced development items that we provided to Edumatch.com. Feel free to browse their site to explore all other features that are mentioned in this section in more detail.

Background:

We needed to fulfill two major client requests that several companies had previously indicated were either impossible or too costly to create.

1) We were dealing with a mascot character who was supposed to present the site and its content in an interactive fashion and provide guidance and feedback dependent on user actions.

2) We needed to provide an extremely user friendly, highly interactive search application with fast response that would allow users to search within one interface for a virtually unlimited number of search criteria combinations.

At the same time, the site needed to retain selection criteria each time the user would return in order to allow the user to refine the search once they came back from viewing product details. Additionally, these search criteria needed to be savable at any point in time to e-mail those criteria for approval to someone else or proceed with the complicated search in a later session.

A major concern was that the target audience consisted of teachers and school district officials who had only minimal internet experience and were restricted to a certain platform and browser version. Hence, everything had to be 100% platform (MAC & PC ) and browser independent (Netscape has currently 15 different browser versions that all operated differently in different circumstances which only became evident once we started creating the search application).

Solution

We educated the client throughout the project on all possibilities and approaches that we were able to implement, and explained our recommendations in great detail so the client was able to make informed decisions about how the project was shaping up. This process ultimately led to an immensely successful site launch.

We created the following modules for edumatch.com that fulfilled or exceeded all client expectations:

• Animated Mascot Guide:
  To achieve the interactive, artificially intelligent animated mascot guide, top PixelBrick/Ceonex, INC animators developed flash modules of the initial character drawing that subsequently were redrawn for different situations and animated in a highly fluid and expressive manner. Additionally, a voice talent was utilized to enable the mascot to speak short words and phrases from time to time giving it more overall impact and interactivity with the user on a very personal level.
• Advanced One-Screen Search Application:
  Aside from a very expressive visual presentation, the client also needed immensely complicated functionality to enable teachers, school district buyers and principals to search for educational software (matrixed by state standards, sub-strands, curriculum features and computer platforms) through a single interface and save their selections for later use. They also needed to be able to refine their selections through 2-3 point-and-click operations, and ultimately mark desired selections for purchase.
• For this search application, we utilized our highly advanced AVA development team to create an incredibly stable, cross-platform, multi-browser application. The modular design allows for data loads to happen in small, fast-loading pieces, and is completely upgrade-able with new functionality and modules. Overall, it provides an almost unbelievable search experience through virtually hundreds of thousands of matrixed software titles.
• Community Section:
  Edumatch.com wanted an interactive educational community section for users to interact with the site on a variety of levels. (For example, they wanted to give teachers access to coupons for future purchases.) Aside from creating industry trust and credibility, this community feature served to brand Edumatch.com as the number one comprehensive teacher resource online rather than just another software store.
• E-Commerce Module:
  The shopping cart in itself provides the educational market with four different ways to check out-to cut through all the bureaucracy usually associated with purchasing software for schools. All of this had to be completely platform- and browser-independent since we were dealing with school computer labs where one platform or browser would have been installed on 100 machines and would never be upgraded just to try out a new site.

Results

Launched highly successful site. Received great industry press coverage.

A common comment heard within the education industry was speculation that the site must have cost at least US $4 million to produce. While we cannot release the actual figure, we can confirm that it was a fraction of that amount.

This extensive, interactive and highly functional site helped Edumatch.com become labeled by industry leaders as the "educational amazon.com" and CDL as the future Microsoft of the educational market.

Another PixelBrick/Ceonex "total success"!