UX Design Assistant (UC Berkeley CalCentral Team)

Position Overview

Do you want an opportunity to do work that will positively impact every other student on campus? Then consider joining the Student Information Systems’ CalCentral User Experience team. CalCentral(link is external)is the UC Berkeley Student Portal, which recently launched to the entire campus.

Working on CalCentral is a demanding job - the expectations are very high - but the rewards are great. You’ll be part of a multi-disciplinary team consisting of professional and student developers, designers, project managers, and support staff.

CalCentral is part of the Student Information Systems (SIS). The SIS department is responsible for operating, maintaining, and improving the core enterprise systems that power UC Berkeley’s academic experience from admissions to graduation.

Under the supervision of the Service Design Director for SIS, the UX Design Assistant is responsible for supporting design updates and new features for CalCentral and should be familiar with and have experience with the full UX design lifecycle, including researching the “as is” functional tools available to students today, interviewing, journey mapping, testing and assessing SIS delivered functionality, plus supporting design efforts, prototyping and 1:1 usability testing of the desired future state. Primarily, this position will be involved in understanding how the SIS replacement impacts students and their experiences on campus, and to a lesser extent, the staff and faculty. Students in this position will be called upon by SIS team members for their opinions and insights relative to a variety of student service areas. Additionally, this position may be involved in organizing workshops with students, conducting outreach efforts, and supporting events.

Qualifications:

Required

• Experience working in positions that demand strong end-user empathy, e.g., customer service, product support, requirements development, etc.
• Experience with one or more wireframing or prototyping tools, ex: OmniGraffle, Invisionapp and Balsamiq
• Experience in current web standards, including HTML, CSS, and web browser capabilities
• Working knowledge of current web markup or scripting languages: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Experience with photo editing and image creation using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator
• Ability to learn new internet and authoring technologies relevant for prototype development, wireframing, UI and process flow, etc.
• Effective verbal and written communication skills and the ability to interact professionally with a diverse group of users and support staff
• Attention to detail and strong ability to learn new skills
• Successful completion/clearance of a UC criminal background check and fingerprinting through UCPD
• Minimum GPA of 2.0
• Ability to work 10-20 hours/week through the academic year

Preferred

• Experience with UX principles and practices, design and research work, with demonstrable strengths in one or more of the following areas: user research, needs analysis, business analysis, prototyping, interaction design, storyboarding, application development and/or visual design
• UX research experience and familiarity with techniques including some or all of these: Design Thinking brainstorming, ethnography, interviewing, needs analysis, and personas development
• Strong design sense, and critiquing ability, to identify well-designed sites and web applications, mobile environments, and the ability to design user-friendly solutions
• Experience proofreading, editing online content, and microcopy development
• Experience mapping end-user experiences, including Experience and Journey Mapping, Storyboarding and creating Service Blueprints
• Experience with Google Analytics
• Experience designing and developing user interfaces for web- and mobile-based applications
• Experience with a modern JavaScript framework, such as Angular, Ember, Backbone or jQuery
• Experience with Sass/Scss stylesheets
• Experience with Git or another source control system
• Commitment to work part-time through the end of the 2018-19 academic year and beyond
• Minimum GPA of 2.3
• Work-study is a plus

Job Duties

Design Research

• Work with the UX Lead to identify and research currently delivered student tools, for example, academic planning and enrollment
• Identify categories of students and outreach to interview a representative sample
• Work with the UX Lead on interview questions
• Interview students to capture their experiences, identify their needs, and develop personas
• Under the direction of the UX Lead, storyboard and journey map, with screen captures, the archetype “as is” student experience for a specified service area
• Assist in UX workshop event planning and preparation

UX Needs Assessment

• Working with the UX Lead, review and map out the base SIS “as delivered” functionality
• Critique the SIS solution against needs identified during the research phase and against students’ needs
• Storyboard the SIS solution with screenshots to map to the archetype student workflow; identify gaps and concerns/considerations
• Assist in analyzing various student-developed tools in use on campus, with a focus on tools that support academic planning
• Assist UX Lead in reviewing and synthesizing research, including drafting Personas, Journey Maps, cataloguing Insights, etc.

Design Prototyping

• Participate in user-centered design sessions with the UX Lead and UX Designer to scope design goals and criteria
• Assist in the creation of sketches and wireframes for user interface (UI) designs
• Assist in the creation of storyboards to explain a workflow or scenario to members of the SIS team or other stakeholders
• Design and develop prototype designs under the direction of the UX Lead and UX Designer
• Create and maintain clear documentation on design revisions and feedback from design reviews
• Develop workflows using a prototype tool and test scenarios and UI/UX issues with students

Organizational Engagement

• Regularly attend meetings with UX Lead and other SIS and Portal staff
• Provide subject matter expertise, as a student, in how students interact with different parts of the current SIS
• Update the Student Team calendar (bCal) regularly
• Use jira tickets to track work
• Attend monthly all-student team meetings