Rebuilding Grupop’s Welcome Page Carousels in Articulate Rise

Grupop’s welcome page (for prospective subscribers, pre-signup) uses two carousels of 6 captioned screenshots each: one explaining the core rewards system, one covering everything else Grupop offers. I wanted to rebuild both in Rise - not just as a like-for-like copy, but as a genuine test of matching Rise’s block types to what each carousel actually is.

The rewards carousel has a real sequence to it: pops accumulate → the meter fills → pupils customise their Pop Pal as a reward → progress resets. That’s a genuine process, so I built it as a step-by-step Process block - 6 numbered steps a learner moves through in order.

The second carousel is different: features like Resources that remember, Everyone is included, Customisable to your needs, Teachers are in control, and Everything made as easy as can be aren’t sequential - a teacher might care about any one of them independently, in any order. Presenting these as a forced Process sequence would have implied an order that doesn’t exist. I built this one as an Accordion block instead, letting a reader expand whichever feature interests them.

What makes this more than just text-in-a-dropdown is what’s inside each expanded item - real embedded screenshots pulled from Grupop itself, not just captions:

This mirrors a decision from my earlier UserGuiding build - match the interaction to the content’s actual structure, rather than defaulting to whichever block looks most sophisticated.

The original brief was a like-for-like recreation of the two existing welcome-page carousels - but exploring Rise’s block library surfaced something the welcome page doesn’t currently do at all. Grupop’s classroom resources (Turn Taking, Random Order, Team Builder, Jobs Board, Quiet Countdown, Pop Pal Prompts, Revision Board) aren’t currently showcased anywhere on the welcome page in an interactive way - they’re just referenced in passing.

Using Rise’s flip-card-style blocks, I built a small interactive grid, placed at the top of the lesson ahead of both recreated carousels: each resource shown as an icon and title on the front, flipping to reveal a one-line description of what it actually does on the back (e.g., “Reward every group with a pop each time the class keeps the noise meter on green for a period”).

This wasn’t part of the original 2-carousel scope - it came directly out of exploring what Rise’s block library could do and recognising a genuine gap in how Grupop currently presents its resources to prospective subscribers. Worth noting as a real example of a tool’s capabilities suggesting a product improvement, rather than the other way around: I went in to replicate existing content, and came out with an idea for new content.

While in some of the previous case studies, constraints and limitations as I initially saw them eventually showed themselves to be worthwhile, clever design choices, the same did not transpire when doubting Rise’s branding options. They turned out to be more limited than expected:

• The course theme supports only one accent colour, applied globally - no native way to set a primary and secondary brand colour, a long-standing, staff-confirmed limitation rather than something I missed.
• The Continue/Start button’s colour can be set via preset variants (Light, Gray, Theme, Dark, Black), but not freely matched to an arbitrary custom hex - a well-documented, multi-year community complaint.

Rather than fight this, I worked within it - setting the course theme to Grupop’s primary colour, and using the preset Dark/Black variants where more contrast was needed, instead of chasing a pixel-perfect two-tone brand match Rise isn’t built to support natively.

The full Rise course that includes the lesson with all three different blocks can be found here, whereas the carousels I was looking to replicate continue to be part of grupop.ie/welcome.html. If the interactive course is unavailable, a walkthrough video is also available as a fallback.