Quick Summary

Timeline of design

Quick Summary

Tyler Technologies is a software company that specializes in designing and developing software for the pubic sector. Their home office is in Plano, TX but two of the major satellite offices are in Maine, where I was hired and worked as a UX designer. The bulk of the UX designers at Tyler work on a UX team that essentially contracts out its services to product development teams as needed. I worked in collaboration with the UX team, but I was hired to work directly within the Payroll and HR development teams for Tyler’s flagship Munis product.

Munis is primarily a data entry application for all areas related to local government including but not limited to finance, HR, payroll, procurement, and revenues. The major selling point of a local government purchasing/using Munis is that it’s one of the only all-inclusive software solutions for local governments. Other software might be better designed or include more functionality for specific areas, but Munis chose to go wide and with moderate depth.

The all inclusive nature of Munis meant that although there was one person or a small group of people purchasing the product, just about every person who worked in the town offices had some interaction with Munis, whether they wanted to or not. Tyler recognized this early in their existence. Although their support network was extensive, they did an incredible job of building an online community and forum for people to ask and answer questions related to the product. Tyler monitored and answered on the forum, but a number of power users emerged as ‘experts’ and voluntarily answered questions to help their fellow public service workers.

This was incredible for the company, for support, and for developing advocates for the product, but it also provided me a unique opportunity to tap into the user-base with surveys and through scheduling user interviews.

Another opportunity unique to the period of time when I joined Tyler was that they were implementing and onboarding Munis in Portland, Maine. I lived in Portland at the time and was less than a five minute walk from Town Hall where the implementation specialists were training people in Munis. Since I am technically on the HR and Payroll development teams, my managers connected with the implementers and allowed me to shadow the implementation process for the payroll team within the City of Portland. I realized it at the time but I was spoiled with the level of access I had to Munis’ user base from a UX perspective.

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