The iSchool congratulates professor Andrew Dillon and recent MSIS graduates Mrunmai Abhyankar and Anajana Menon on winning the 2025 Stanley Caplan User-Centered Product Design Category Excellence Award. The recognition comes via their work redesigning the website of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas (TRS).
The award judges praised the project’s rigorous design methods, thoughtful integration of human factors, clear documentation and transparency, and commitment to stakeholders and users. According to the press release, “The judges were particularly impressed by TRS’s commitment to human factors principles throughout the design process, including extensive user research, iterative testing, and evidence-based decision making.”
The project came to Dillon through an alumni connection. Beth Hallmark, chief communications officer at TRS, is an iSchool alumna and served for a time as director of career services at the iSchool.
“[Hallmark] is well-versed in the school’s research and the skill sets of our graduates, so she identified us as a suitable resource for helping her agency improve the user experience of the TRS website,” Dillon says. “Generally, our alumni are positioned in many state and local agencies and often maintain connections with the school through events, career fairs and internships. It’s a very synergistic relationship for the iSchool and public entities.”
Dillon encouraged his then-graduate students, Abhyankar and Menon, to put their iSchool training to work on this real-world scenario. That training includes a strong empirical approach to UX design and evaluation, as well as an emphasis on using mixed methods to determine areas for improvement.
“After examining the current site and its known issues with TRS, we developed a set of representative tasks to cover the range of functions desired by stakeholders,” Dillon explains. “We used standard measures of effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction to compare real users' performance on the original and new design. In this way, we were able to quantify explicitly the improvements brought by the new design, suggest areas for further refinement, and confirm what areas of user experience were most challenging or rewarding.”
Dillon notes that, in addition to bringing methodologies from their iSchool training to bear on the redesign, Abhyankar and Menon also demonstrated key skills in recruiting and managing users for testing and in documenting their findings in a way that TRS could easily understand. The impact of their work will be felt across Texas, as education workers are more easily able to plan for and manage retirement.
“The many thousands of members of the TRS will now have a demonstrably more efficient, effective and satisfying experience accessing appropriate information and advice on their retirement plans,” Dillon says.
The Category Excellence Award is a new distinction within the 25-year-old Stanley Caplan UCD Awards, created to honor submissions that demonstrate exceptional strength in specific aspects of user-centered design. It’s an honor to be the inaugural recipient, Dillon says, but the benefits of projects like the TRS design for his students far outstrip any award recognition.
“For Mrunmai and Anajana, it was an opportunity in their final semester to put their education to work with a real client, applying their knowledge in a project outside of a classroom that actually improves real people’s lives,” he says. “The award is icing on the cake and deserved professional recognition for their work and the relationship they built with the excellent TRS team.”