AJI
software
THE PROJECT
During the summer of 2014 I interned at a software firm named AJI Software in Kansas City, MO. While at AJI Software, I drafted and designed a CMS for a local elementary school. What I really enjoyed about this project was that AJI Software had volunteered to make a CMS for this school for free as a way to give back to the community.
To start the project my manager, co-designer, and I had a call with the school's principle to talk through what they were hoping to get out of the system. The goal of the project was to create a content management system and app where teachers could post information about their classes, schedules, and events. Parents could then login and see what was going on with their child's classes and schedule.
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GETTING STARTED
With requirements in mind, my co-designer and I started sketching ideas for a home page and the hierarchy of information the users would need. Once we had some ideas together we created wireframes to give a more organized look into the system. From here we wanted to get some baseline feedback to see if our ideas were on the right path. To do so we walked around to coffee shops and asked patrons some basic questions about if our navigation made sense and what they would expect to find on pages given their page name.
REVISING & TESTING
After getting some basic usability feedback we revised our designs. During this process we expanded the wireframes to show more pages of the intended CMS and ran designs by the development team to make sure the designs could work as intended. After we felt we had a solid prototype together we brought in some teachers from the school and conducted usability testing. The teachers gave us some great feedback that let us to make more design tweaks.
With my internship ending for the summer, we presented the final prototype to our managers. Based on the design work and testing we had done, AJI Software was able to later work off of our prototype and create the final CMS for the school.