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Student Information
System

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation needed a

better platform for hundreds of educators to handle over 35,000 students in dozens of different educational

programs across 31 different institutions throughout the state.

Project Overview
Education helps inmates more than anything else, but teachers spend most time doing admin work instead of teaching.
My Role
Lead UX
Design / PM Mentor
2024 - 2026
Unique Challenge
We worked with internal teams to teach them design, product and engineering leading to a  wide array of skill levels.
Outcome
Overall admin and data entry time spent lowered by over 90% & teachers spending 8x more time with students

Timeline

A selection of my recent case studies. Click any project to see more details and images.

Framing & Discovery

- Initial UX / User Research
- Started with college, the most complex of the 8 different education programs
- Ambiguous feasibility dealing with legacy systems (grey box)
- Problem defenition and policy discussions

The Middle

- Additional prototype testing & iteration
- College pilot and release
- New stakeholder & new direction to build 1 application for all other programs.
- College program change management
- Example of a flow in the previous (highschool equivilancy) program

Ongoing

- All program prototype testing & iteration
- Task focused pilots like attendance, certificates, gradebook, EPR, milestones
- Syllabus creator & editor testing
-  Internal policy debates led to several decision changes after software was shipped.

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Problems

Big Problems

A proven cure for recidivism

The more educated an incarcerated person is, the less likely they are to be repeat offenders. The state has made it so inmates are rewarded with time off their sentence for doing well in school.

Teachers overworked

Teachers are required to do tons of data entry and admin work in a system that focuses on security and control for custody officers.

Data Informed Education

Previous systems did not make data accessible to decision makers. Nobody knew what helped or hindered different groups of incarcerated persons.

Specific Problems

Creating a class

Individually based and required a ton of steps. Classes had to tie back into the custody system which carried other challenges.

Attendance

Attendnace was done on an individual basis.

Grades

Grades had to be entered in in multiple places

Report Cards

Navigating to where an individual report card was filled out took forever.

Certificates, merit & milestones

Forms meant time off in inmates sentence, but reqirements took forever to check.

Syllabus creation & editing

Editing any type of syllabus took dozens of people and hundreds of dev hours.

Solutions

Starting the term

Classes & Assignments can be linked cutting down hours of data entry. All dtudent infor and edits are in one spot, and attendance can be done in bulk or individually.

Classes & Assignments
Students
Attendance

Logo and Visual System

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Responsive Website Design

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Product Launch Campaign

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Ending the term

Syllabi are structured with dozens of Components and hundreds of modules & standards. These can be created and customized by Program Leads. In the gradebook, a teacher can only see 1 component at a time due to their size. Merit & Milestone credits can only be entered when criteria is met.

Grades
Merit & Milestone
Syllabus

Logo and Visual System

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Responsive Website Design

image of tech device with app interface

Product Launch Campaign

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Impact

6

main flows are now bulk based  

8x

more time spent with students

90%

reduction in admin activities

User Quotes

We are used to doing things by individuals, not by classes. This is amazing!

College Coordinator
Mule Creek

I can enter grades and milestones for a whole class, all at once. Oh my god, this is mind blowing!

College Coordinator
Folsom

This is on the right trac. It’s so much easier to move around and manipulate than SOMS, it is saving me hours every day.

ABE Teacher
Pelican Bay

I think this is wonderful, for my Assistant Principals who are going to be approving these and for College Coordinators.

Principal
CSP Sacramento

Lessons Learned

This application had roughly a dozen different types of users carrying out tasks for 8 different types of educational programs. Additionally, not every institution did things in the same way or has the same roles. SIS was also the first application to write information back to the SOMS custody app and the technical hurdles here had a big impact on the design. All these were still problems that I had the tools to solve, it was just a more complex problemt. The real challenges are highlighted below.

Major Challenges

  1. Stakeholder Alignment
  2. Stakeholder turnover
  3. Organization Change Management

Working within a large government organization such as CDCR means that several groups and people are involved in every decision. If what you are building goes against a persons or groups internal political objectives than things can become difficult. This project had tons of churn from stakeholders, including a new stakeholder completely changing the direction of the application. Change Management is key for any large enterprise product and should start as soon as it can so the change is expected. CDCR's initial ideas around this were more waterfall based, but we were able to pull them closer toward testing, pilot programs and incremental releases. Of all these issues I think I probabaly ended up sinking the most time into stakeholder alignment,

Good design is about making things easy to use and nice to look at.