For many New Zealand schools, ETV is already woven into everyday classroom learning. Teachers across the country rely on the platform to access thousands of educational videos aligned to the New Zealand curriculum, with rich metadata, searchable topics, and on-demand access helping educators quickly find relevant content for students.
With more than 150,000 videos available, ETV had built an incredibly valuable educational resource and established itself as the largest online video platform for educators in New Zealand. But while the content offering remained strong, the website experience was beginning to fall behind.
Years of growth had created technical and usability challenges. The sheer scale of the content library was slowing the platform down, search functionality no longer felt intuitive enough for busy teachers, and the visual experience did little to communicate the excitement and imagination that great learning can inspire. The site had become highly functional, but not especially engaging.
ETV needed a website that felt faster, smarter, and far more reflective of modern education.
Brand IQ partnered with our sister company Austin Digital to rethink both the visual experience and the usability of the platform. The challenge was not simply to redesign a website, but to make a vast educational resource feel more accessible, inspiring, and enjoyable to navigate for teachers working under constant time pressure.
A major focus of the redevelopment was improving the organisation and discoverability of content. With such a large volume of videos available, intelligent categorisation and a far more streamlined search experience became essential. The new structure helped educators locate relevant material more quickly and intuitively, making the platform more useful in real classroom situations where speed and simplicity matter.
Visually, we wanted to move away from the traditional “educational database” feel and create something that captured the magic of learning itself. The new design introduced more dynamic, captivating imagery that reflected curiosity, imagination, creativity, and engagement, helping position ETV not just as a content library, but as a powerful classroom learning tool.
The user interface was simplified and modernised to create a cleaner, more user-friendly experience across the site. Navigation became easier, the platform felt lighter and faster, and the overall experience became far more approachable for both existing users and schools discovering ETV for the first time.
Importantly, the redesign balanced inspiration with practicality. Teachers still needed robust functionality, rich metadata, and efficient access to curriculum-relevant material, but now those features sat within a far more modern and visually engaging experience.
The result was a website that better reflected the scale and quality of ETV’s offering while making the platform easier and more enjoyable to use. More than a year after launch, the client reported that the site continued to perform strongly for schools across New Zealand while also generating a reliable stream of new enquiries, proving that thoughtful design and usability improvements can significantly strengthen even the most established educational platforms.
