LAL Schools

Enhancing the experience of booking a language exchange program for everyone involved

LAL Schools is a London-based English and Spanish courses chain specialized in language exchange programs. With courses in 8 different countries, it distinguishes itself by promoting its students a unique experience that combines regular methods with complete cultural experiences which include sports practices, cooking classes, events and sightseeing trips, and much more.

In early 2018, LAL contacted us to give its website a facelift, standardizing its visual language and written communication, plus revamping of courses display. Besides, we also created from scratch a booking system, totally integrated with LAL's back-office operation.

The new system allowed LAL to sell courses and packages directly to final customers, creating a new B2C revenue channel, free of travel agents commissions.

.roles
ux designer
ui designer
ux researcher
CMS backend dev

When in London... improve the way they do

To fully understand the business context, technical feasibility, and mostly, users' perspective, we've conducted a series of workshops, field observation, and interviews with staff and students at LAL's headquarters in the UK.

Even though the initial goal was to gather insights for the website redesign, were identified during the research several back-office issues - such as student enrollment management, payment confirmation problems, inconsistent, confuse and uncentralized information - that directly affected the service experience.

Even though the initial goal was to gather insights for the website redesign, during the research were identified several back-office issues - such as student enrollment management, payment confirmation problems, inconsistent, confuse and uncentralized information - that directly affected the service experience.

The travel starts way before boarding

From the homepage, users are presented with the variety of experiences LAL offers around the world.
With a great focus on imagery, the new homepage supports focused and exploratory use patterns.

Unique destinations pages

How can students get excited to explore the uniqueness of each destination if all the city pages look exactly the same? We customized each one of the 30+ pages to reflect the city's atmosphere. In a CMS-friendly structure, the destination pages go from macro to micro, presenting the city, the school facilities and all the courses and experiences students can enjoy while in town.

For distinct expectations, distinct approaches

LAL Schools' two target audiences are at distinct life moments, and LAL's offering is perceived very differently by each of them. While adults (16+) usually seek LAL's courses aiming to take the next step in their careers, for youngsters (ages 8 to 18), LAL's experience represents an unforgettable vacation or the transition to adulthood.

Embracing these two different expectations, while keeping the branding cohesion was key. Each public-specific page is slightly tuned to its respective target audience in terms of palette, typography, photography, iconography and content.

Composition of elements used to Adult Public

Composition of elements used to Young Learners Public

11 languages to teach English

LAL's website is the gateway for students from all over the world. For this reason, it supports not only multiple languages, but also multiple alphabets, including Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Arabic.

Assertive, even for those who are exploring

The new search system is simple, though comprehensive. Thus, both students who are certain about the destination and course or those who are still deciding can find their ideal pick.

From the search, users reach content-heavy yet captivating course pages, which are directly and seamlessly linked to the booking process.

Course inner page, showing courses title, details, location selector and a featured image of a group of young people rafting on a boat.

Search results page, showing the title 'We have 15 Young Learners Summer Schools courses for you', followed by a course's card. On the top of the card, is an image of group of young girls dressing swimming suits and laughing, followeb by courses title, details and button to know more.

Location selector, showing a list of available destinations and a 'book now' button at the bottom of the list.

Surprises? Only the good ones on the trip

Payment review interface, showing student info, summary of course choices, extras, grand total and buttons of payment options.

With the brand new booking system, a new B2C channel was opened. Whilst gives users the ability and autonomy to book courses on their own, this travel agent-independent buy, in a sense, could also assign them the responsibility of any issues (issues which can be more than simply financial when sending your child to study abroad).

To avoid any unpleasant surprises and reinforce trustiness, the whole booking system was designed to be smooth and fluid, but also cautionary and unequivocal. Users have in plain sight always, no small letters, the list and amounts of the current items. In a more subtle approach, good friction techniques were applied to the process, including UI ones (like stepped-forms, no-autofill and double-confirmations) and back-office ones (like an elaborate state-machine confirmation flow that ensures consistency between user's order, payments and enrollments and enables LAL's internal agents to complete a partial booking if the user needs help). The final result allows the user to pick and understand every detail of the trip.

And speaking of which, to our pleasant surprise, just a few hours after launch, while we were working on the last details and hotfixes, with no advertising or whatsoever, from a small city in Saudi Arabia, someone bought his nephew an English course entirely using our platform.

Head of Design	Daniel Imaeda
UX/UI Designer	Alan Maranho Piercarlo Melatti
UX Writer	Alan Maranho

Head of Development	Diego Sanches
Frontend Dev	Bruno Vaz Piercarlo Melatti
CMS Dev	Alan Maranho
Backend Dev	Diego Sanches Marcelo Barreto

LAL
Schools