Clever Tykes online portal

Clever Tykes is a book brand that aims to teach important values and life with positive entrepreneurial role models. Having secured a contract with Lloyds Bank to distribute hard copies of the books through to 23,000 UK schools Clever Tykes required an online portal to provide extra value to schools, parents, and their children.

Invite-only registration

Access to the portal is exclusive to schools and the parents of children that attend those schools, so there had to be a mechanism to restrict access but also allow schools to easily add users to the system.

The chief point of contact at each school is able to add a list of parent email addresses, the system then emails each with a personalised invite code so that they can register online.

The portal then uses these invite codes to assign the newly registered parent to the School that issued them the invitation.

Step-by-step tutorial mode for new users

The education portal has been built to cope with high numbers of users. Given this volume, there was a high risk that Clever Tykes staff could be inundated with phone calls and support emails about how to use the system.

To solve this problem we created a step-by-step tour feature to show new users the main functions. Elements of the page are selected in each step, and instructions are provided to help people to fine their way around.

Entitlements driven e-commerce

The web app boasts eCommerce functionality allowing both parents and school staff to order books and teaching materials. However, teachers packs are only available to Schools, so the system uses role based entitlements to only deliver the products relevant to each user types. For example, only schools can see the teachers packs.

Clever Tykes administrators can add and update products in the system and can set the who has access on a product by product basis.

Resource centre and online viewer

The primary purpose of the portal is to provide digital versions of the books and teaching resources to schools and parents. We created an easy-to-use resource browsing area to allow you to filter resources by category.

Each resource is viewed directly from within the portal rather than being downloaded to prevent unauthorised sharing of the PDF versions of the books. The viewer links to a downloadable certificate so that parents can print and give to their children once they have completed each book.