Sing Up

In 2008 we won the tender to develop the Sing Up website. Sing Up is the Music Manifesto’s National Singing Programme for primary school-aged children in England, it is run by a consortium which includes The Sage Gateshead, Faber music and AMVBBDO.

The design of Sing Up needed to appeal to teachers, children and the consortium. The site itself integrates with many other services including the national teacher database, Education Direct’s and Faber’s ecommerce system, and contains its own music player.

The biggest challenge of the job has been to get it working in schools and in classes. This requires an entirely different approach to UAT. Rather than carrying out internal UAT or using an external agency to trawl through the site, we need to enlist real users in real schools. School IT policies vary, what works for one does not work for all. Teachers’ and pupil’s specific requirements need to be catered for, the site must work in real life and hold the attention of a class full of primary school kids.

The site is interspersed with characters to engage the interests of the younger audience and keep the whole thing ‘on brand’ from start to finish. We have built an area of the site called a song bank – which is essentially a media player which allows for selection and streaming of the Sing Up Catalogue – packaged with everything needed to teach children to sing.

We designed and built Sing Up, we host and support it. We are currently working on new and exciting projects for Sing Up, rationalising the user experience and optimising the entire design.