In Brazil, the best universities are public — and free to attend. That means the competition is stiff. Everyone has to take a college test called the ENEM (National Exam of Intermediary School) to qualify.

A secondary school education in Brazil often isn’t enough to prepare students for the ENEM test. Those who achieve the scores needed and qualify for a college education are often those students who can afford extra courses and private tutoring. Descomplica — which translates to “take the hassle out” in English — was created by a former teacher who wanted to even the playing field.

Descomplica provides students with a video catalog of high-quality exam preparation content for about $3 a month. The courses work: 78% of their students out-perform the national average on the entrance exams.

While that’s been highly successful, the next generation of Descomplica had to deliver more than a video library. We envisioned an experience that could help students prepare, but also create custom learning plans that evolve over time and help to better assess individual skillsets. Now, students get weekly milestones for the courses they need to take and performance. Statistics help students understand how they’re tracking, and they can get access to teachers for questions.

The platform is also flexible and extensible: its library delivers 15,000 videos, and eight hours of live-streamed content seven days a week, to over eight million students a month.

Descomplica’s scalable platform aims to go beyond that one test and help students through life stages. So when they want to apply for the BAR exam or a career that requires additional certifications, students know they can turn to Descomplica.

When it comes to learning, ensuring that it’s fun and accessible is a huge differentiator. The design integrates friendly and engaging moments directly into the digital experience through a combination of copywriting and illustrations. Descomplica online live class before the ENEM exam in October 2015 was Twitter number one global trend, beating Adele on the day of the launch of her single, "Hello." We were the biggest classroom in the world with 850,000 students.

The classes aren’t about passive learning, either. An average of 600,000 messages are exchanged during live classes. To maintain the feeling of fun, we interwove social elements throughout the design, including a leaderboard that keeps students motivated and practicing. The leaderboard scores by engagement as well as the ability to track friends through Facebook and the results are staggering: engagement has climbed to an average 80 minutes per visit on the site, and log in every three days. The ability to interact with other students also better reflects the interpersonal connections that can develop and help promote learning inside of physical classrooms.

At Work & Co, a core value is making digital experiences open and accessible. Because access to internet in Brazil isn’t always reliable, steady or fast, we ensured that each lesson allows students to download videos to watch offline. This way, whether they’re in-transit or on cellular data, courses are ready to view anytime.