Endowment Management System

The University of Texas at El Paso

Design a user experience prototype for the Office of Institutional Advancement for The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) faculty, staff and student that have endowment management responsibilities.

Key features:
• User experience design and user interface that helps unify and organize endowment information and tasks
• Cross-departmental Collaboration
• Data driven content and interactions

Role

UX/UI Designer

Scope

Team of 3 Staff and 3 Students
3 month time frame
Cross Collaboration with UTEP’s Office of Institutional Advancement and Enterprise computing

Platform

Desktop Browser

Tools

Adobe XD, Creative Suite

The UTEP endowment system maintenance process was in dire need of modernization. Much of the process at the time was having to login and update multiple 3rd party databases that were separate entities. This created a unnecessary workload of repetitive tasks not only for the office of institutional advancement’s staff, but for all stakeholder parties tasked in the endowment process.

Working under the vision of the Director of Operations for the university’s Office of Institutional Advancement, I designed a user experience and interface design that helped understand tasks by different people within the endowment management process. This system pulled in all the third party data and centralized them and the all their parts in its maintenance. It was called the Endowment Management System (EMS) and it was one of the first of its kind.

• How do we organize data and tasks of multiple players with different parts within a specific or numerous endowments?
• How do we make the experience feel intuitive?
• How do we design an interface that simplifies and improves the experience of managing endowments at the university?

• Using the right interface design approach
• Understanding how to design to the goals and tasks with different users within the endowment process.

Mapping out the user flow helped establish the tasks such as reporting in the maintenance process, a basic and important responsibility by multiple stakeholders in the endowment process.

The designed prototype created a visual foundation to help the stakeholders and content matter experts understand the experience in a high fidelity format as well as help the developers build the UI with accurate proportions and code.

The final product launch was a huge success. Not only did it help simplify the endowment management maintenance process for faculty, staff and students at the university it also won 2020 The CASE Circle of Excellence Grand Gold Award, which is a global award, is rarely given- only for “game changing” submissions. ​

The system was such a huge success that the Director Chelsea Lamego who founded the project left the university and created a start-up company “FundMiner” based around this novel software concept. 

These mock concepts were the initial designs that were used in the prototype stage of EMS launch.

Work