About U-Explore

U-Explore is an EdTech company specialising in careers guidance for young people in schools and colleges. With a passion for ensuring every young person has access to the information, advice and opportunities to help shape their future, the company has a rapidly expanding network of UK schools, colleges, students, teachers and advisors.

U-Explore’s mission is to inspire, engage and connect young people with the right opportunities. Start is U-Explore’s digital platform, which plays a big role in achieving the company’s mission by engaging its users and connecting the various stakeholders. 

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Making a ‘Start’ on improving performance 

U-Explore partnered with ddroidd to refine its Start platform, increase its performance, enhance user engagement, and introduce new functionality with ongoing application management.

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Project delivery

Before implementing new features, our team conducted a full performance review of the platform, identifying inherited bugs and technical limitations. To prepare for development, we upgraded both the back-end and front-end CMS, ensuring a stable foundation for new enhancements.

The front-end, previously running on Angular 4, was upgraded to version 10, bringing the platform up to speed and ready for innovation.

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Single Sign-on

While Start previously offered single sign-on (SSO), it wasn’t fully compatible with the onboarding process and often didn’t function as expected. Our development team rewrote the SSO logic, ensuring smooth authentication between platforms and an easy user experience.

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Automatic course updates

The Start platform features an up-to-date course directory showcasing thousands of educational opportunities. Manually keeping this data up to date was time-consuming. We implemented an automated system that syncs with the UK Department of Education’s website, ensuring quick and easy course updates while saving valuable admin time.

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Improved user experience for special needs users 

U-Explore wanted to make Start more inclusive to ensure its platform was accessible to everyone and improve the user experience for those with special needs who may have difficulty reading the website in its previous format. By integrating the UserWay plug-in, we enabled customisable text sizes and colour adjustments, giving users greater control over readability and accessibility.

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More engaging user experience

As part of the journey young people take on the Start platform, information is gathered and summarised throughout the process to give a sense of progress. We have created a more visually engaging interface, including the ability to summarise the user's progress at a high level through more detailed activities on easily accessible visual 'cards'. As part of this, we developed reusable templates for surveys and questionnaires, allowing U-Explore to quickly create and deploy interactive content and accelerating its ability to engage students in meaningful ways.

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"Since ddroidd took on our project we’ve been able to improve performance through some deep dives on the underlying architecture and have made improvements to background processes as well as the refactoring of some core logic, which has made the overall platform more efficient as a result. We’ve also recently been able to simplify and reduce some of the infrastructure to make some cost savings, while the additional rigour that ddroidd brought to the project has uplifted the quality of processes through to documentation.

As a result of the additional development we’ve undertaken with ddroidd, our national platform has been extended to be locally customisable. It now delivers inspiring, localised and contextually relevant information and opportunities to young people across a wide range of areas within the UK.

The flexibility of our dedicated team at ddroidd means we are able to consider them an extension of our own, and we include the team in early scoping sessions and in helping to shape our longer-term development strategies and approaches."

Martin Smith, Head of Tech at U-Explore 

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Project outcome

With these improvements, Start now delivers a platform that performs better, is engaging, and is accessible to students. The platform runs more efficiently, automates key processes, and enhances user journeys. We continue to support U-Explore as its trusted technical partner, maintaining the site through ongoing application management and innovation.

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