The General Services Administration FEDSIM University

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From 2016-2018 I worked as Lead UI Designer on the FEDSIM University project for the General Services Administration (GSA). FEDSIM University is GSA’s internal training Learning Management System (LMS) that hosts a variety of eLearning courses to support GSA employees. These courses provide training in acquisitions, financials and project management for new and existing employees.

I started out the design process by presenting redesign options for the existing course interface that was slightly outdated. I presented these three style tiles below to our government client.

 

In the end, for consistency, our client decided to keep the interface the same, but rebuilt in our current eLearning authoring software with minor updates to add a few supplemental features. I created a fully-functioning prototype in Adobe Captivate and presented it to the client. The prototype was approved and I moved forward with building our first course.

 

As the project developed, we added two more designer/developers and a project manager to the team to help with course build-out. We used Agile methodologies including daily scrum meetings, JIRA for task management and development sprints to keep our activities organized and running smoothly. Over the course of our first fiscal year, I led the development of 10 complex eLearning courses. In addition to building courses myself, it was my job as lead to train and mentor the other designers, help troubleshoot and solve complex problems. I also kept detailed documentation and created a variety of templates to facilitate development.

As lead, I had to figure out how to build complex courses featuring a variety of different themes: a gameboard, choose-your-own adventure, comic strip, and film strip-themed course each with a variety of complex features including a dynamic table of contents, completion checks, complex animations, different types of quiz questions including multiple choice, true/false, matching, and drag-and-drop. Each of these features were custom built which required extensive advanced actions scripting.

 

At times, it was challenging to keep everything consistent. I created a detailed styleguide (see snippet) and a design system with reusable components to keep everyone on track.

I also ensured that of our courses were completely compliant with Section 508 standards. Although Captivate’s default code output was not fully accessible to screenreaders, I developed a system to make the output user friendly for the screenreader user. All of our courses were adherent to WCAG 2.0 Level AA accessibility standards as of January 2018. We performed extensive quality assurance testing to guarantee high quality deliverables. I also managed each course’s transition into the FEDSIM University LMS by interfacing with GSA’s LMS administrator and testing SCORM settings.

The client was consistently pleased with our team’s work.