Hachette Learning Website
As part of its rebrand, Hachette Learning required a new website that reflected its professional identity while delivering a seamless user experience. The site needed to provide customers with easy access to valuable resources and enable them to make purchases efficiently, ensuring a smooth and effective browsing experience.
Designer(s): Vishal Mayo
Developer(s): IDHL
The challenge
Hachette Learning, formerly Hodder Education, underwent a major rebrand, shifting its focus from traditional print publishing to a more ed-tech-driven approach. As part of this transformation, its outdated website required a complete UI/UX overhaul to align with the new brand identity and enhance usability.
In addition to this outdated site, Hachette Learning had acquired multiple businesses over the years but had failed to integrate them into a unified digital ecosystem. As a result, the company needed to merge several standalone websites into a single, cohesive platform. The new site would serve as a central hub, allowing educators to discover and engage with the full range of Hachette Learning’s offerings.
The redesigned website aimed to deliver a seamless user experience, making it easy to navigate an extensive catalog of products and services. Key functionalities included product purchasing, locating local sales agents, accessing customer support, and exploring educational resources—ensuring users could efficiently find the tools and information they needed.
The user
The primary users of the website are teachers seeking learning materials, educational products, and support related to Hachette Learning. While purchasing new products is their main objective, they may also need assistance with digital platforms, accessing past purchases, and staying informed on the latest educational news and resources to support their teaching and students’ progress.
Additionally, students and parents may also benefit from the website, using it to find extra learning materials and study support outside of the classroom.
The outcome
Modular & Versatile
The Hachette Learning website needed to be scalable and adaptable to support continuous growth. With new products, content, and pages being added regularly, the site was designed to not only provide valuable information to customers but also enhance SEO performance over time.
To achieve this, I structured the website using modular and versatile components, allowing them to be reused across different pages for various purposes. These components were designed to be customizable, enabling them to display different content while maintaining consistent functionality, ensuring both efficiency and flexibility in site expansion.
Various Product Types
One of the most challenging aspects of the website was designing the product pages. Hachette Learning offers a diverse range of products, but their previous website lacked consistency in both layout and structure. The different product types included:
- Books
- Ebooks
- Print & Ebook versions of the same product
- Ebooks with multiple subscription options
- Subscriptions (single or multiple options for the same product)
- Magazines
- Digital Downloads
- Events
Each product type had unique requirements and selection options, making it necessary to design multiple versions of the product page to support their distinct functionalities. However, maintaining a consistent and structured layout was equally important to ensure usability and scalability. The solution was a flexible design system that could accommodate current and future product types while preserving a cohesive user experience across the site.
