As the sole UI/UX resource at Three Rivers Systems in 2012, I had the opportunity to work on a variety of projects. But none to the scale and complexity required by Student Management.
Fortunately, following a Lean UX mindset, I had the privilege of working alongside a small and Agile team.
Early Designs
Starting from published mobile design guidelines and working closely with Product Owners, I began designing a set of common patterns.
Initially, wire-frames and mockups were done in Balsamiq, but stakeholders preferred a higher fidelity, despite convention.
Using known constraints, I had written several valid HTML, CSS3 and JS interface prototypes, from which I captured screenshots and overlaid descriptive text in Photoshop.
This gallery features some very early designs I created and reviewed with the team to assess validity – for both the information architecture as well as the user flows we had designed.
First Version
In late 2012, I built the first version of the responsive, iPad-resolution layout that was actually tied to data. This was used as a springboard for building-out key functionality, including Billing, Student Registration, Guided Application, CRM (v1), and a workflow ruleset builder.
Though significantly evolved from initial designs aesthetically, we were able to preserve much of the user flow that had been established – for better or worse.
This iteration also introduced some theming capabilities that allowed setting a single background-color or gradient that could naturally color various parts of the UI through transparency alone using CSS3.
Further Refinement & Features
The early part of 2014 was focused on both improving existing usability as well as a substantial redesign to CRM, and an overhaul of site navigation. Case studies for both are available, but narrative is verbal while I optimize for web-delivery of the content.
There was also the addition of the light theme. Here a few slides from my presentation at Users Conference in 2014, introducing some of the new concepts.
Unit4 Acquires Three Rivers Systems
In 2015, the company was sold to Unit4 and our once-small group grew substantially. With the infusion of resources, we added numerous teams and began scaling and refining the feature set.
With Unit4 headquartered in The Netherlands, we added support for a number of European locales and I began integrating with the broader global brand and the Unit4 Design System.
The video below was captured after I redesigned the login screen with new branding and imagery – dynamic with locale-selection.
Truly Comprehensive & Modern
Over the course of the next few years, I had the unique privilege of helping to grow our small product into a truly cloud-based, Enterprise-class Academic ERP.
These are just a few of the key features that I personally designed the UX and developed the UI for in that period of time:
- Academic CRM
- Student Registration
- Transer Courses
- Degree Audit
- Record Attendance
- Grade Management
- Analytics Dashboards
- Report Builder
Latest Rebranding 2020
With a new CEO in 2018, came a change in direction that included further branding updates. This was slated for delivery Q1 2020, and was delivered on-schedule.
Below is a video that I shared with the head of Global UX once I had completed the scope of work.
All Good Things…
In July of 2020, after 8 years of service, I was laid-off along with the remaining few members of the “original” engineering team. The remaining operations for U4SM were moved to Europe – with COVID costs cited as the primary cause.
I’m proud of what our small team accomplished and despite the unceremonious ending, I will always be rooting for “Project: Mosaic” – a.k.a. Unit4 Student Management.
Jit is a one-of-a-kind, talented professional that I was very fortunate to hire. His deep knowledge of tools to develop UI/UX for our Next Generation product, along with his artistic talents, matched our specific needs. He quickly became part of the team that I relied on to take my business to the next level.. (see the full quote on my LinkedIn profile)
