J1 Finance

*Due to an NDA, I am limited in what I may display. Please visit Jenzabar’s website for more information. Feel free to reach out for more details. 

Overview

Jenzabar Finance is a comprehensive, secure, and integrated financial management platform designed exclusively for higher education. Jenzabar Finance connects your entire institution via a centralized database and a complete suite of fully-integrated modules. Jenzabar Finance allows authorized users to share, update, store, and report on real-time information across departments. Jenzabar Finance can be rapidly deployed out-of-the-box. Its interoperable workflows easily adapt as your institution’s policies change and technology evolves.

My Approach and Contribution

While working for Jenzabar, I have been a member of two teams. These include the Finance team and the Design System team. As a member of the Finance team, I have overseen all aspects of the General Ledger and Budget products’ designs. As a UX Designer for Jenzabar, I have worked closely with interdisciplinary teams throughout the entire design process. This process included conducting and utilizing research, prototyping, testing, UI design, feature spec writing, and collaboration throughout the development process. 

Project Elements

User Personas

During the early stages of the design process for the financials project, I conducted in-person and remote interviews as well as surveys gathering persona information and user stories.

Minimum Viable Product

Once I created personas, I conducted content audits on our existing products as well as competitive analysis to form our MVP for our financials product. In doing so, I worked closely with PMs, Developers, and our advisory board.

Information Architecture

With personas defined and a clear vision of our MVP product, I then designed the information architecture and journey maps. This work involved card sorting, tree testing, A/B testing, and more interviews with existing users and potential users.

Wireframes and Prototypes

When the product’s information architecture was in place and journey maps defined, I proceeded to create low fidelity wireframes and prototypes to test and uncover any missing patterns from our design system.

Design System Component Design

When I discovered missing patterns, I researched, designed, documented, and tested new components before adding them to our design system. This process included meetings with PMs, UX, Developers, and users to ensure the components were built in a usable, accessible, and global way.

Iterative Design Resulting in Hifidelty Design

After designing and moving the new components through the design process and into our design system, I moved finance designs from low/medium fidelity into high fidelity designs. In doing so, I met with PMs, Developers, QA, Doc, and DBAs to ensure the product’s design would meet all technical and organizational requirements.

Feature Specs and Through Development

Following technical and functional meetings where features were verified as feasible, I worked closely with design developers and PMs to write feature specs. These feature specs were then groomed and moved from design to development. Once development began, I oversaw each feature through development and into testing. 

Developed and Tested

As features moved through testing, I worked closely with QA to ensure all acceptance criteria were met and bugs found and addressed promptly. 

Continued Testing

The project I am currently working on is moving through this process. Several features are in earlier design stages, while others are developed and ready for additional user testing.