UCLA Opus
Opus is a software suite developed and maintained in-house at UCLA for the Office of Academic Personnel. As Outreach Coordinator, my work centered on improving users' work lives through information, education and training. This often involved technical communication, on which I have focused for this collection, however I also developed the brand spec evident in this work.
My responsibilities with Opus started out narrowly focused on visual communication. But when I realized the extent to which our users also needed direct assistance and training, I gradually expanded outreach to focus more holistically on facilitating an understanding of the software and how it should figure in daily work.
My 'go-getter' mindset led to initiatives associated with everything from answering help desk tickets to writing knowledge base articles and organizing online learning sessions. Eventually, I even came to perform product design and UI/UX. For example, here is a before-and-after example of a user interface from one of our most frequently used screens:
Key UI improvements on the new version of the candidate profile (labelled as Paul Myers) include better grouping and differentiation of functional elements. My goal was to enhance linkage between UI elements and work tasks, specifically to link the visual treatment of the former to details about the latter. Putting changes like this in place not only helped our users, it made our own lives easier as well.
Not content to simply produce graphics, I also staged in-person learning sessions. Usually these were accompanied by visual assets in the form of PowerPoint decks:
