User interviews

 
Brandie

Brandie Barbee - GMEA Office Member/OPUS admin

Brandie was our key point of contact for GMEA. She is responsible for managing OPUS as an administrator and she was responsible almost solely for fixing and maintaining the events sponsored by GMEA.

  • “OPUS was a bit of a ‘frankenstein’ product of features being added as time went on”.

  • “I spend hours upon hours when trying to coordinate events because directors don’t understand how to use OPUS”.

  • “We have so many work-arounds to fix issues in the current system”.

  • One of the major issues is with registering students. Directors will create profiles for students already existing in the system for every event.

  • Would like to see OPUS used by their users more regularly and as a tool to communicate, connect, engage, and inform.

Ryan

Ryan Barbee - GMEA Office Member/OPUS admin

  • People are lost when using OPUS and contact the admins regularly to register for events

  • Most of the directors are using OPUS only to register students, but they want more user engagement.

Jon

Jon Cotton - Director/Band Division Chair

  • “I have been using OPUS for years and I have found my own way to make it work. I still don’t know how to explain it because I just do it when it happens”.

  • “My division and district directors contact me regularly to verify registration information”.

Cecil

Cecil Wilder - GMEA Executive Director

  • Is a retired director, but still organizes events using OPUS.

  • Showed us examples of how he accomplishes tasks in OPUS, but ultimately was not useful information.

Matt

Matt Koperniak - Director/Organizer

  • “I spend several hours a week when organizing events to approve/deny requests or to remind users when deadlines are”.

  • Showed us examples of where OPUS was broken and not functioning properly.

Evelyn

Evelyn Champion - GMEA President

  • Would like OPUS to manage much more of the process when coordinating events.

  • Emphasized the usability being a priority as well as creating a functioning database that would store all the user, student, event, scoring, location, announcements, and calendar events effectively.

Key Insights

  • Users were mostly using OPUS for registering for events.

  • When errors or usability issues occurred the users did not know how to fix these issues themselves.

  • Admins spent much of their time trying to fix user issues.

  • The efficiency of OPUS was very poor with many redundancies and user “hacks” to make it work.

  • User engagement was poor due to a lack of feature prioritization, visibility, and hierarchy of features.

  • Users wanted OPUS to serve as an effective platform for communication.

  • Aside from registering for events it is difficult to find other features.