- Brand
- Co-design Workshop
- UX & UI Design
- Web Dev
The culture of our country, Italy, fascinates people from all over the world. This is well known by Treccani, publisher of the encyclopaedia of the same name and Italy’s largest publishing enterprise in the cultural sphere, which has decided to launch a new online school dedicated to foreigners interested in learning the Italian language.
The school, which offers excellent digital learning through online group lessons, is aimed at foreign adults, mainly resident in the United States and Europe, who wish to learn Italian for cultural, tourist or business reasons.
Design it right
At the helm of Giulia is a long-time friend: Matteo Colò, former founder and CEO of Wanderio and Diana Marano, former Executive Director at an Italian School in San Francisco. Matteo and Diana chose Moze to develop Giulia’s digital platform, asking us to help their team with user experience design and full-stack development of the e-commerce website.
We needed to first understand the user journey and the operational processes to be digitised in order to facilitate the work of the staff and teachers. We decided to start with a Co-design Workshop, the process we created at Moze after years of experience in accompanying entrepreneurs in designing a new digital product and making the right choices for its development.
Through co-design sessions conducted via videoconference, we deepened the context and objectives of the project and defined the operational requirements of students, teachers and administrative staff. This allowed us to identify the most appropriate technological solution for an initial release and to prepare an Agile work plan, organised in sprints.
An innovative tech stack for a Lean startup
Giulia’s team knows that a start-up has to be fast. We reasoned with them to see what tech stack could enable the school to sell and manage online lessons quickly and without too much hassle.
Smooth back-office: Airtable. Which back office should be used to manage the information of classes, customers and teachers? Rather than embarking on a long journey to find the most suitable management software, Giulia’s team proposed using Airtable, a low-code platform that allows internal applications to be built and interact with its data via APIs.
Low-code e-commerce with Next.js, Airtable API and Stripe
Accepting payments online. Stripe Checkout is the low-code solution for creating customised payment pages hosted on Stripe. It is highly customisable through its API and allows you to accept a large number of payment methods.
A platform for e-learning: Disco. We wanted to give students the possibility of having a complete e-learning platform, enriched with features for interaction between colleagues and teachers via messaging. We chose Disco, a customisable cloud service that natively offers many of these functionalities.
A website with great capabilities and performance: Next.js and Vercel. To develop the e-commerce site, we chose Next.js, an open source framework that extends React. It is a highly flexible technology that allows you to benefit natively from:
- Native support for search engine indexing thanks to Server Side Rendering and Incremental Static Regeneration.
- Excellent performance thanks to staticised content offered on Vercel’s CDN.
- Server development capability in Node.js thanks to serverless functions. From an architectural point of view, these functions were essential to interact with the Airtable API and the Stripe Checkout server-side API.
A flexible and powerful CMS. Sanity is a cloud platform that allows very high customisation of the content structure. Sanity is characterised by its headless approach, which enables a totally customised UX, and its SaaS model, which reduces maintenance costs.
Designing a start-up’s Brand Identity between tradition and innovation
Giulia was starting from scratch and needed to quickly define a logo, typography, colour scheme and visual imagery for the brand. How best to design a new identity? How to communicate the Italian language learning experience in an attractive way, reconciling the elements of digital innovation and the institutional support of a brand of the calibre of Treccani?
We chose to build the personality of the Giulia brand by combining an elegant and refined style with playful and light visual elements. The result was a feminine identity, capable of speaking in a friendly tone but not without that touch of authority typical of the Treccani brand.
We chose as our primary typeface MADE Mirage, a modern and elegant serif, and designed a colour palette rich in nuances, with warm and welcoming tones.
We focused the visual language on the human figure and iconic aspects of Italy and the Italian lifestyle, to make the brand desirable by allowing people to identify with it. These photographic elements are complemented by delicate illustrations, which help to imagine a pleasant and light-hearted learning path.
The e-commerce: storytelling
Giulia offers a digital service; we chose to place great emphasis on the illustration of an online course, to immediately immerse the user in what will be their future learning experience. At the same time, we have included on the home page some visual elements capable of constituting a strong reminder of the institutional presence of Treccani, which ties in perfectly with the cultural narrative of our country.
Courses and online purchases
Italian courses are delivered via online group lessons. Each course lasts three months and always takes place on a specific day and time, from Monday to Saturday. We have designed filters to facilitate the user’s choice of preferred day of the week and time slot. The results are displayed dynamically, based on the user’s time zone detected by the site automatically. The user is then able to complete the purchase in a very intuitive way, thanks to the checkout page implemented via Stripe.
«Moze is able to achieve an excellent result in terms of both design and technology, with a keen understanding of business and user experience needs.»
Matteo Colò
CEO, Giulia