An open-source project founded at the University of Minnesota with a potentially game-changing idea: basing curriculum and personal evaluation on goals and outcomes (e.g. a medical student's video showing her bedside manner and ability to competently perform a patient intake interview) instead of just grades in classes.

The Need

ePortfolio went through several phases of evolution and feature additions. I tried to get involved whenever I could, and from 2000 to 2008 dipped into multiple roles including usability consultant, designer, business analyst, and project manager.

The Work

• Helped shape several rounds of new features and improvements, including tagging elements and simplifying portfolio management and sharing.
• Designed and ran usability studies to help us determine the most intuitive words for naming complicated concepts and interactions.
• Ran interviews, field studies, and focus groups with users and stakeholders to help define needs for new feature phases.
• Facilitated user testing of prototypes and pre-release development to suss out sticky points in the interfaces.
• Absent an assigned business analyst, wrote the requirements for two phases of new features.
• As project manager for a nearly a year, I managed and prioritized tasks for our team of nine mostly telecommuting designers and developers. Our team consistently met development and bug fixing milestones and deadlines on time with quality work. I also helped draft budgets and projects timelines, coordinated relationships with stakeholder departments and user groups, and maintained a Wiki with our updates so that open source collaborators as well as stakeholders could follow along with our progress. At the end of the year, I was offered a promotion to lead a helpdesk team, but decided it was a good time to strike out on my own to freelance and pursue personal creative projects instead.