Case Study
Brochure of Services
The Instructional Coaching Group has 22 separate services that they showcase to potential clients to help determine which is the best for them. All these services need to be listed in one easy to find document.
Scope: Re-Design the Brochure of Services for Instructional Coaching Group
Project Type: July - November 2024
Role: Lead Product & UX Designer
Tools: Pen to Paper Sketches, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign
The previous Brochure of Services was made with a print design in mind. This meant that the entire document was designed with the intent that new clients would be handed a book that showcased all existing services.
Previous Intro Page
Previous Marketing Page
The main issue that jumped out at me was the fact that the document was made with the intent to print, this opened the door for a whole host of issues such as:
ICG offers different pathways depending on who you are and what your profession is. For example, if you are a teacher there is a different set of recommended services for you to take compared to if you are a coach.
The previous Brochure of Services didn't have a dedicated area to showcase the pathways which became problematic as it meant the sales team wasn't able to spend their time with potential clients selling products. But rather they would need to explain the basics of pathways.
The services that ICG offer are ever changing, as many of the workshops and institutes are based on research. This means when new research arises, changes may be made. Or a new service might simply be added to the existing lineup.
With this knowledge, when you take a look at the existing Brochure of Services it doesn't have it's own design system that will make it easy to expand or quickly change a service as needed.
I have already mentioned that the previous Brochure of Services was designed for a printed, physical format. This is a major oversite of the purpose of this document.
The Brochure of Services is offered by the sales team to allow new clients to see a high level overview of the products ICG offers. Clients can then have a deeper level chat with sales to learn what is right for them based on a couple of different factors. Who they are, What position they hold, Cost of a service, How much time they have to offer.
With this background in mind, Sales sends the Brochure of Services over electronically for someone to view on their computers or mobile devices. But because this previous document was intended for print, it doesn't take advantage of what a PDF can do. It is missing clickable links that are internal and external of the document that can help guide users through the PDF with ease.
By taking the principles of UX and UI Design I can create a new Brochure of Services that puts the clients front and center to create a easy user experience as well as streamlining the sales team job.
Utilize the power of an Interactive PDF to create a new document with links that are both internal and external to the document.
Organize the Brochure of Services to tell a story and walk an user through every service with ease.
Use icons, colors, and hierarchy to assist in preventing the eye strain and clutter that comes with a large amount of text.
After understanding the pain points of the existing Brochure of Services, I could dive into how to organize my plan of action to achieve my goals in a timely manner.
By using something like Asana to compile everything needed for this project I can:
I can list everything from least important to most important. As I know in 2025 there is a plan in place to send out and conduct surveys for the new Brochure of Services, I can get the large pain point items checked off first.
Another benefit to compiling everything in one place, is streamlining the process with all team members. This allows for quick turnaround of designs on my end when everyone is working as a well oiled machine.
After compiling all the information I noticed that it was a LOT of text that was used in both the past Brochure of Services as well as in the general copy of each service's explanations.
This meant that my overall solutions to a new Brochure of Services needed to lean on visuals to prevent the large amount of text to clutter up the screen.
Previous Service Page(s)
Knowing what the new Brochure of Services needed, I was able to plan ahead and know out what areas needed to lean to visual language by asking the sales team and users what are the most frequently asked questions.
Translation: add visual elements or indicators where users can click on buttons or links within the new Brochure of Services PDF.
Translation: add a section that showcases who to contact for users to dive deep into the nitty gritty of a service or services.
Translation: Add visual indicators to show who a specific service is for as ICG has many users. (Administrators, Coaches, Teachers, and District Leaders)
Translation: Add visual indication of the specific pathways ICG offers so that a leader can plan for multiple years in the future and build trust and relationships with ICG.
Knowing that I am relying on visuals to help break up the amount of copy that is needed in the Brochure, it is essential that I sketch out my ideas. Not only to get any less than stellar ideations out of my head and onto paper, but it gives me a guide when I am working up the final digital files.
To help with the overall flow of the full document, I created an introduction pathways page to allow users to clearly navigate to their specific needs.
This allows for users to either scroll page by page through the entire PDF or click into a specific pathway page.
Apart from keeping a clean hierarchy, and consistent branding. Using icons to bring color and visual interest was another important decision.
These icons draw user's eyes and allow for quick scanning of the page. Another benefit is the ability to use these not only within this project but across many other areas of the overall ICG design language. This creates consistent branding, and a memorable experience.
I want to take a moment to showcase one of the pathway pages.
All of the pathways that ICG offers include a large amount of information and copy. There is not only a recommended yearly pathway to follow but additional courses that could be added to a personalized plan. The question for me was: how can I make users understand all that is offered without unnecessarily cluttering the page or expanding into multiple pages?
By keeping a large focus on typographic hierarchy and columns I was able to achieve all pathways within a single page for each. Again I re-used the icons I had made and used on the introduction page. This reinforces the design system at ICG and keeps branding consistent.
By breaking up the pathways into years, and additional courses, I was able to make sure users eyes don't glaze over facing an influx of information. This also preps users to ask better questions to the sales team as they can go into future conversations knowing what a standard pathway looks like. Questions pertaining to additional services can now be brought up quicker.
Finally, by adding a "build your plan" button to each pathway it invites users to continue engaging with ICG's material by exploring the website. This also informs users that they can customize any and all plans to get a truly unique and customized experience.
Full suite of icons
Icons in Black and White
As visual storytelling was a high priority for this project, I created a suite of icons to be used within the Brochure of Services.
These are the icons that cover each user category. The categories include: organizations with prior experience, organizations without prior experience, administrators/district leaders, teachers, and coaches.
The target demographic of ICG is 45 - 60 years of age. Knowing this, I wanted to keep the icon style bold, but retain the creative flair that ICG is moving forward in.
In that same idea, I incorporated the dotted circle motif that is present in the newly updated website. Again allowing for consistent branding.
It was important to make sure the icons were accessible. Not only for standard design practices, but knowing the demographic of ICG is 45 - 60 years of age.
By choosing a design style that is bolder with less details I could ensure that the icons were readable just by their shapes. You can see this and test it by changing the icons into black and white and observing their values.
One of the main issues of the previous Brochure of Services was only having copy and no iconography which had the result of a wall of text.
To combat this, I created icons that can be used on every category within each service. By doing this, users are able to quickly scan a service page and not only see a clear breakdown of the description of a service but see the most common categories regarding a particular ICG product.
The use of icons to break up information allows for users to get common questions out of the way. As the most common information is found easier than before. Again, allowing for the sales team to dive into the nitty gritty of the services and complete contracts.
Category Icons
There are many different ways that a user might be given a Brochure of Services. They might get it directly from the sales team, or maybe a consultant will send it over if it was inquired about during an event.
Because some users might not have talked directly to one of the Sales team members, having a clear contact page is a high priority. Especially since the previous Brochure was missing one.
I was able to design a dedicated contact page to allow users to reference back to their Brochures at any point in time if they need to reach out.
I chose to have an emphasis on the sales team, specifically their headshots. This allows for that visual element that I had a priority to add throughout the entire brochure. But additionally, people remember faces and are drawn to faces. So if someone has briefly met any of the sales team at an event they could quickly identify who they needed to reach out to.
After initial talks with stakeholders, I learned that many large organizations like school districts, need to have a copy of a particular service(s). And these service showcases needed to show takeaways and overall information.
These service showcase pages are needed to allow for funding to be approved and therefore was a priority for me to achieve in this project.
Knowing this background, I was able to create single page showcases for each service that ICG offers that fit with the Brochure of Service design system and overall ICG branding.
With these pages I kept the branding the same, and pulled the icons that were used in the full Brochure of Services. This allows them to feel related and positions ICG to have cohesive branding across the board.
As these service showcases are a full page for one service rather than a half a page like in the Brochure of Services, I was able to use that extra space to add additional information like the content overview and key takeaways.
I made sure to keep in mind leaning on visuals rather than text and was able to incorporate checkmarks and bulleted lists to help break up large swaths of information.
By using a template where I could plug in the information specific to a service, it not only allows each single page to look similar to each other. But it allows for this single page showcase to be evergreen. As new services are created and old ones leave; or even if an existing service changes it will be easy to adjust. I was able to create flexibility and growth for the future.
My biggest challenge that I encountered was how to take a large amount of copy and fit it into a shorter amount of pages than previous iterations without the document feeling bloated. Each service isn't short, some are week long institutions that many people fly out for. They cover a lot of information.
By leaning on the visual aspect of design, and determining the most important information from research, pain points, and target audience I was able to come up with solutions to achieve my goals.
As ICG keeps evolving and growing services might need to change, be updated, or even removed as new research and data comes out in the education field. This means that the Brochure of Services can and should be updated.
The next steps I will be taking is to hear updates from the sales team as Q4 of 2024 comes to a close. And in 2025 send out surveys from users who have seen and experienced the new Brochure of Services to see what changes made the most difference and what needs to be re-structured.
