Settlement Authorization Release System

You hurt your toe at UC Riverside. You sue the University of California and come to a settlement. UC Riverside’s lawyers need to communicate with UCOP’s lawyers and risk department via a form called a SAR to get you your money. This app manages that communication so UC employees across California can approve the SAR and the SAR can route itself though the appropriate channels (e.g. A $10,000 settlement may only need a risk manager to approve it, while a $1,000,000 settlement needs to pass through the entire risk office, several lawyers, and even the chancellor of the university’s desk).

This was my first project at UCOP, beginning literally my first day on the job. I was a one-person design team, carrying the process from research and developing ideas through to delivering final visual designs. The goal of the project was to take an existing web application, which had been designed and built with purely functional considerations and redesign it using user-centered design methods. My design process had 2 phases. First, I interviewed users across the state of California to understand their needs and generated a research report for my stakeholders/clients. Second, I prototyped and tested a new design for the user interface and delivered final visual designs and interaction specifications to my development team. This project was a growth experience for me because I had never carried a project’s visual design before. This project started me on a long path of improving my visual design skills over the years.

Skills Used:

• Research Planning
• Contextual Inquiry
• Research Synthesis
• Report Writing and Presentation
• Interaction Design and Prototyping
• Visual Design
• User Testing