GEORGE WENDAL

The University of Maryland partnered with startup company KualiCo and several other higher-education institutions to create the "next generation" of student information systems, starting with a curriculum management system. I was selected as the primary designer on the project, and worked with an outstanding team of developers, business analysts, and subject matter experts across multiple higher education instituions to deliver the product.

The team adopted a continuous delivery approach, emphasizing getting the product into use as quickly as possible and iterating rapidly based on feedback. Often new features would go from design to development in hours, rather than days or weeks. The process was very collaborative - much of the design work was done quickly at a low fidelity and shared with stakeholders, users, and the development team for feedback.

Meeting the needs of multiple higher education institutions resulted in several interesting design challenges, including:

• Figuring out how to display the workflow status of a proposal (including approval history, previous nodes and future nodes) in a way that didn't take up an entire screen
• Designing a rule-builder for course requisites that includes conditional logic and grouping
• Uncovering commonalities in how institutions present learning objectives in order to present a customizable, but still consistent experience

As the product evolved, I worked with other talented UX designers (working on separate KualiCo products) to set the design direction for KualiCo. Together we defined not just the fonts, colors, typography and other visual elements, but also general interaction patterns and layouts to maintain consistency across the whole product suite. Our goals were to create a product that was usable, responsive, visually inviting, and that adhered to strict accessibility guidelines.