Challenge
In 2000 Jones International University was one of many in a new crop of for profit, all-online universities offering real degrees over the internet. By 2002, the simple hook of getting a degree online wasn’t enough to increase enrollment numbers. JIU wanted to use e-mail marketing to reach potential students and give them the experience of interacting with its sophisticated online learning system. Coupled with the emergence of online chat, the University asked TMP to help deliver a compelling Open House experience online to reach the most prospects as cost effectively as possible.

Strategy
The core IT team at JIU built and supported an Online Learning System that the entire student body and faculty used for class registration, participation, and graduation. The admissions marketing team proposed using this same system to interact with prospects in an Open House. TMP needed to build an Open House information site, registration and e-mail marketing system to get prospects to the event. On the date and time of the event, prospects would then use the Online Learning system to chat and interact with admissions staff, current students, faculty, and alumni in Q&A sessions. The entire experience was designed to introduce candidates to the online learning experience and convince them that an MBA could be attained online at a fraction of the cost and inconvenience of attending an offline campus.

I worked as the project’s Information Architect to assist the creative and development teams build a solution with the following components:

• Information website with only the “right” content to motivate a student to explore more via an open house
• Custom e-mail marketing engine that took qualified names from the admissions marketing database and solicited registration for the open house
• Back-end user interface to allow JIU Admissions staff to easily setup new events, track registrations, and send reminders.
• Online Open House User Interface within the Online Learning System to facilitate the chat and provide information to the prospects, then ultimately motivating students to Enroll.

The client did the project right by funding proper usability testing so that we could ensure the workflow for both admissions staff and propsects was as natural as possible. Working with a branding agency as well as the local IT department many kinks were worked out during testing and it made the staff much more confortable in administering the real open houses.

Results
Online Open Houses became a fixture of the admissions marketing process at JIU. The client experienced excellent enrollment rates after them. Continued enhancements to the e-mail marketing and registration systems were created to allow more frequent events to drive even more conversions.

Challenge
Recruitment presentations by Fortune 500 companies are often delivered in front of large open-house audiences. Recruiting teams put together custom PowerPoint presentations on the businesses they are recruiting for, many times with outdated information and inconsistent branding. We wanted to help our clients maintain a consistent and professional employer brand in front of these important audiences.

Strategy
We designed and built a web based PowerPoint Presentation Builder from the ground up with a very ambitious feature set. The idea was to provide a single place for recruiters to access pre-approved presentations, build new presentations from collections of PowerPoint slides and media files, and provide a best practice knowledge sharing community to help recruiters put their best foot forward when presenting. My role was information architect and web designer on a small team of programmers who overcame many technical hurdles. The site allowed for:

• A searchable database of completed presentations and individual PowerPoint slides classified with metadata like audience type, presentation length, and topic
• An automated builder that could recombine user-selected slides into a new presentation within the web interface
• User profiles that tied assets in the system back to individuals, including ‘favorites lists’ for storage of frequently used presentations
• FAQ’s and articles on how to use the system and public speaking skills

The intent of the platform was for it to become a product that TMP could sell via an ASP model to a variety of clients that shared these challenges.

Results
A major recruitment client purchased and embraced the system, giving it high marks for streamlining their presentation delivery. Within a year Microsoft’s own technology (Sharepoint) advanced beyond the system’s capabilities, slowing demand for the product.

I joined the dot com craze as a UI Designer at Who2Trust.com, a site that helped people find a service business through their personal and professional network. We did this by allowing consumers to recommend businesses to their connections online. Consumers could read the recommendations alongside profile information provided by businesses to make an informed choice on who to use. While there are also business that offer services like a megsss_91

My role was to improve the site’s user interface as the company’s strategy shifted from a b2b professional network to a b2c marketing site. I worked with our marketing team and an outside agency on a complete redesign. We also worked with SEO company Victorious for our marketing options. For the site’s look we chose to use images of people and a conversational writing approach to appear both friendly and trustworthy. With an information architect I helped to define the overall navigation system and was exposed for the first time to database driven design concepts.

While Who2Trust failed as a business venture, the site received excellent feedback from consumers regarding its ease of use. The market was not quite ready for the product concept, but Who2Trust was a success because of the amount of functionality we were able to build with little venture captial. It was a truly great experience that brought me into contact with every aspect of starting up a business – from Marketing, to Strategy, to Business Development, and prepared me for bigger and better things in the Internet space.

The DocuTech line of production printers created the digital production publishing industry in the early 1990’s and became a billion dollar business for Xerox Corporation. The original DocuTech’s black-and-white touch screen, mouse and keyboard user-interface were attached to the printer. I became part of a design team that created replacement DocuTech pre-press software on a standard platform detached from the printer.

We created a user interface that leveraged many DocuTech workflows, while taking advantage of faster Windows NT PCs running 16 bit color screens. The reduced number of interface layers and streamlined workflow increased operator productivity on job setup tasks by 40% as proven in usability studies. In my visual interface design role I worked directly in the development tool, Visual Basic, to create screens and storyboards for usability testing. I was responsible for the design of over 150 icons and layouts for over 60 UI dialogs. The design team was “embedded” with the software engineering group to build and test design tweaks within the development environment. This approach produced a product in a little over a year.

After completing the software design, I also designed and coded a beta customer website that was used to solicit feedback about the upcoming release of the product.