We recently decided to give NYLearns a much-needed facelift.  That means a new logo and new colors, but most importantly, we’ve added a brand new support page.  Why are we so excited about a new support page?  First, let me give you a little background on the new design.

Why So Blue?

We chose a blue that wasn’t too far away from the old NYLearns color scheme but was still within our PLS 3rd Learning brand guidelines.  One of the main goals was to align the PLS 3rd Learning brand with our projects, and NYLearns has been the flagship portal of PLS 3rd Learning.

The new logo is directly connected to the PLS 3rd Learning brand in order to develop a uniform look and feel within our projects.

Thanks to Mike Tuberdyke, the lead designer on the NYLearns re-skin project, the logo, colors, and overall feel of the site have moved toward a lighter, more modern feel that will grow with the PLS 3rd Learning brand.

Time for a New Design

Since our last major design update in 2010, we’ve developed new teacher tools, like the ePlanner, and upgraded existing tools, like Curriculum Mapper and ePortfolio.  We’ve also added over 10,000 questions to the Assessment Builder and hundreds of new educational resources to our Featured Content section.

While improving our teacher tools and updating educational resources has always been a top priority, we felt like it was finally time to give NYLearns a new look.  We started updating the design for every tool, button, tab, link, and icon on the site and quickly realized what we were missing: more support options to fit the lifestyle of our entire user base.

The Support You Deserve

Giving our users everything they need to make their NYLearns experience as awesome as possible is really important to us.  In fact, we even won a Stevie Award this year for our support efforts!

Our users are primarily teachers, who are arguably the busiest people on the planet.  When they’re not in the classroom, they’re thinking about the classroom; grading papers, preparing assessments, or planning projects.  Since our goal is to offer tools that make their lives easier in the classroom, we wanted to make sure that our support for those tools matched.

We’ve always offered live support Monday through Friday, 8 am to 5 pm.  Unfortunately, that happens to be when most teachers are in the classroom.  So we developed more self-service support resources like video tutorials, FAQs, user manuals, and (our favorite) Ask Ashley series that are available 24/7.

We also included more ways to connect with our educators through social channels like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and our blog.  Now, users can access our support resources from anywhere on the site by clicking on our new Support tab located on the main menu to send us questions, ask for new features, or find updates on resources for the classroom.

So what are you waiting for?  Start clicking around and, please, let us know what you think about the new look of NYLearns.