Background
The Georgia Music Educators Association is one of fifty-one state affiliates of the National Association for Music Education. My job was to retire a legacy application and create an updated design that addressed the many issues the users were experiencing.
GMEA sponsors conferences for teacher members. For the students, GMEA provides performance evaluations for individuals and ensembles including band, choral, and orchestra students at the elementary, middle and high school levels.
GMEA stages all-state events ranging from elementary school to college and university. More than 20,000 students participate in their all-state program and approximately 17,000 students perform for adjudication at Solo and Ensemble Evaluations.
The Georgia Music Educators Association has the fourth largest membership among state music education associations in the United States.
Problem
OPUS is the web application that GMEA uses to coordinate all of the events they are responsible for hosting. From the time it was launched until now it has been pieced together at various stages with new features and components creating an nonuniform user experience that has confused many of its users. As a result, the administrators are constantly going through and manually fixing errors or responding to requests from the users.
MY Role: User interviews, information architecture, wireframes, usability testing, clickable prototype, branding, and style guide.
Heuristic Evaluation
User Interviews
Cecil Wilder
Executive Director
Evelyn Champion
GMEA President
Brandie Barbee
Assistant to Executive Director
Jon Cotton
Band Division Chair
Ryan Barbee
Director of Publications
Ryan Koperniak
Band Organizer
With the initial user interviews I made the mistake of allowing the users to explain how they use the current application and all of the pain points they encounter. It didn’t leave me with enough time to ask the questions that most concerned me, or the questions I thought I would benefit from the most. My later interviews focused on the users explaining what an ideal flow for tasks they perform would look like.
