The Suite Spot.

A content and resource hub for Yamaha Educators.

Services

Let’s create more music makers.

The Challenge

Yamaha has always demonstrated a consistent dedication to creating the next generation of music makers. At the heart of that commitment are the educators, and Yamaha wanted to augment the available information and resources that those music educators want and need. They needed an educator + lifestyle approach to content building and curation, while providing information on how Yamaha products are intertwined with the learning experience.

The Solution

A plethora of great content already lives on the Yamaha Music Hub, which covers everything from music ideation, composition and performance. However, the Yamaha Education team needed a resource that was all about the educator and the students they serve. We created the Yamaha Educator Suite, which serves as a resource hub and an outreach platform. They can now setup mini campaigns such as the Yamaha 40 Under 40 with pre-built layouts at their disposal. Another campaign arises? No problem. Within a couple clicks, they can create large-scale campaigns without any technical or design intervention. The result: a platform that serves both as a marketing communication hub as well as an informational resource.

How We Got There.

We’ve worked with Yamaha for years, and we’ve had several Discovery sessions around the wants and needs of their educators, so we were able to hit the ground running with an expedited Discovery/ analysis process. We immediately went into personas, which are fictitious narratives of the different types of users – both current and prospective. These help ensure we keep their targeted users – music educators – at the center of the design and functionality for the project. We performed in-depth competitor and content analysis to understand who else is reaching this audience and how they are connecting with them. After this, we were able to solidify an effective digital strategy. Through our moodboarding exercise, all stakeholders were able to identify and come to consensus around a coherent aesthetic perspective. This drove the development of the wireframes, so we could map the personas to a blueprint of the site. Once these were finalized, we went directly into prototyping, combining design and development in one real-time process to decrease time-to-market, while reducing project time and costs.