Lente

Reverse Alarm Clock

Skills Applied:
Experience prototyping, prototype walkthrough, scenarios

I worked with a research team to understand how ubiquitous technology in the home can help create an environment during the morning wakeup routine for dual-income parents to be better parents. This work takes a "role" enhancement approach by focusing on user needs within the enactment of a specific role.

The emerging wakeup system we designed, prototyped, and tested through participatory design employs a nurturant technology approach to improve the environment that surrounds the wakeup activity by providing young children with a relative view of time and aiding in the management of the morning choreograhy, helping everyone arrive at the point of departure together.

NASA

Mobile Devices for Problem Reporting and Corrective Action

Skills Applied:
Literature review, affinity focus setting, contextual inquiry, ethnography
(In progress)

Currently in progress, the goal of this project is to design and develop a well-designed mobile device for front-line NASA technicians that will facilitate problem reporting and management and the current the NASA Problem Reporting and Corrective Action System (PRACA). This device will improve the safety and risk management for the Constellation Program, while proving compatible with current standardized system processes. The final product will be a functional prototype built to support end users by successfully demonstrating specifically-defined tasks chosen for their frequency and importance.

Memory Cues

Skills Applied:
Research methods & design, experience prototyping
(In progress)

Currently in the generation phase, I am involved in designing a prototype from previous ethnographic research with Alzheimer's patients and their caregivers, as well as technological research such as the Microsoft SenseCam capture technology. This prototype will discover how cues should be presented to patients such that memories associated with important people in their lives are maintained and reinforced. Several ideas have concluded from this research: (1) use of ambient technology to display associative pictures of events and experiences, (2) narrative completion and chunking, and (3) collaborative tagging and cue developement/identification.

Website Designs

Skills Applied:
HTML, CSS, Javascript

Communication Design

No Cats

A Social Network Magazine for Personalized Web Experience

Process Website

Skills Applied:
Research: Directed storytelling, bricks and mortar, competitive analysis
Synthesis: Persona, moodboard, mental models Design: Scenarios, wireframes, hi-fi flash prototyping

Using research methods such as directed story-telling, brick and mortar observations, and competitive analysis, we designed a personalized web experience that allows dog owners to establish and maintain their community as well as become better, more responsible owners. We identified this target market of large group special-interest users and designed the website to support and meet their needs of sharing experiences and information regarding their immediate surroundings with others in their community.

Passing the Bubble

Collaborative Exchange of Strategic Information

[Project Overview Website]

Skills applied:
Research methods and design, participant management, video ethnography, audio transcription, statistical analyses

I studied as physical mechanisms for improving collaboration and decision making. The focus was decision making that depends on decision-makers and information analysts sharing their understanding, particularly when they cannot be face to face with each other. The interaction between these two groups involves commanders passing their intent to their information analysts, then refining their plans and decisions on the basis of information gathered by their analysts, often using live and recorded video to enrich and reshape collaborative exchanges. The specific research aim was to determine how and when to use a gestural and instructional techniques to effectively share situational awareness and pass strategic information among geographically distributed team members.

Recipe Space

Information Presentation of Procedural Instructions

Skills applied:
Experiment design, empirical research methods, statistical analyses, prototyping

This project investigated information representation as a means to increase the capacity of people to coordinate actions in an effective and efficient manner. Based on the theory that interaction with this information, as well as the design of the information itself, shapes our activity in a dynamic flow of distributed cognition, the project aimed to satisfy two main goals: 1) design a better representation of procedural information, a challenge that has persisted in information visualization, and 2) understand how people interact with text and images to coordinate activity. I studied cooking recipes as the medium for analyzing the interaction between humans and dialectic and procedural visual representations and discovered why certain representations of cooking recipes were found to be experimentally better than othersand how environment is structured in the process.

ViewAdvance

High Tech Product Innovation Service Design

Skills applied:
SET Factors & product opportunity gaps, stakeholder identification, contextual inquiry, persona & scenarios, competitive analyses, technology ecosystem, value opportunity analyses, pugh charts, market analyses, business models, technical specifications, flash & HTML prototyping

As a project for a High-Tech Product Innovation course, we designed collaborative software for the company, DesignAdvance, to aid in the communication during the PCB circuit board development process of home and small business technologies. The current process requires multiple iterations and throwing-over-the-wall between stakeholders before the design is finalized. The final design was in the form of a service software/e-service that provided standardized part libraries, real-time correction tools, as well as a 3D Viewer integrated into current development software such that errors can easily be detected and work management amongst specialists is significantly improved.

MESA

The Emergence of Shared Attention

Skills applied:
Ethnography, directed observational methods & artifact use, interviews and questionaires, video coding methods, auditory transcription, statistical analyses

I gathered observational data in a longitudinal study, analyzing interactions between parents and infants dyads and objects in their natural environments. The purpose was to develop a theory of the emergence of attention-sharing skills and learning, perception, and emotional processes, and answer many questions about cognitive and social development in order to transcent current machine learning approaches to social development:

The findings suggested the development of infant learning relationships between caregiver gaze, caregiver hand motion cues and infant gaze following events in scripted play interactions. The data from the study and learning software were used to develop a series of computer and robotic simulations of infant-parent interactions through embodied computational modeling to study the dynamics of social systems in general. These results pointed out new ways to develop “autonomous systems” (e.g., computerized teaching assistants; “helper” robots) that become socially intelligent and interactive via human-like developmental processes, as well as new forms of diagnostic and treatment methods for such learning disabilities such as autism.

[Project Overview Wiki]

Blogger

Wake up and blog!

Skills applied:
Affinity Diagramming and Focus Setting, contextual inquiry interview critiques, contextual design modelling: work, artifact, physical, cultural, sequence, heuristic evaluation (UARs), cognitive walthrough (UARs), keystroke level modelling with CogTool software, think aloud (UARs), prototyping

We performed multiple HCI Methods on the current interface design of the Blogger online software, looking at the activity and work context and breakdowns involved in blogging, evaluation according to specified heuristics, learning the interface, predictions of cognitive, perceptual, and physical interaction with flow screens, and observing natural user emotions, thoughts, and concepts.

Our redesign corroborated this consolidated this information and improved the editor/composer interface for posting and editing blogs. We proposed context-aware editing, natural interaction with text and media objects, consistency, as well as intuitive, streamlined sequences for performing actions.

[Blogger Usability and Redesign Document]

gWeather

Skills applied:
AJAX, functional & technical specifications, usability analysis and interaction design

As a project for an HCI Programming course, our team developed a gWeather API for Google Calendar using AJAX. Weather information was extracted from weather.com and displayed within the context of time, day, events, and location. Users can thereby coordinate activities and events according to forecasts both in current and other locations, reschedule events upon notification of weather conditions, and have the ability to prepare for unexpected weather.

Translation Correction Tool

Using Humans to Improve Machine Learning

Skills applied:
Contextual inquiry, contextual design, heurisitic evalution, keystroke-level modelling

We performed a study how machine translation can motivate people to help improve the heuristics of the Machine Translator. Our goal was to transform the tool into a game such that incentives would reinforce game play. We investigated two separate foci: translation and gaming, through the application and adaptation of HCI methods. Under the context of gaming in different genres and styles, we discovered differences in the levels of engagement, player roles, and interaction styles. From these models we were also able to generate a basic set of "needs" or actions that should be present in the interface.

Our final design was a post-editing game that consisted of how the information should be presented, the interaction between players, motivational support, system functionality and translation architecture, and the game mechanics.

Time to Coffee

Mobile Information System

Skills applied:
Personas, scenarios, navigational flow wireframes, storyboards, Flash prototyping

Our challenge was to create a mobile information system that would help people find a coffeeshop. The primary question we asked was, why a phone? Why not a GPS? We explored the possiblities of mobile phones, and designed an interface that would satisfy the needs and intents or our persona, as well as umbrella to a larger population.

The final design integrated communication betweeen personal devices and coffeeshop services. The system provides users with: real-time location and shop information, updated event information from personal calendar sources, directions auto-send to GPS, and a pre-ordering system that allows users to pay with their phone.

[Flash Prototype]

Microwave Interface

Rapid Prototyping & Iterative Design

Skills applied:
Paper Prototyping, VB.Net

Insurance Reconciliation Software

Usability Analysis & GUI Design

Skills applied:
Heuristic Evaluation, high-fi flash prototyping, demographics

This work was performed as a Design Consultant position for PEP Systems, startup company that develops and markets insurance reconcilization software. With the knowledge following software and field training, I performed a usability evaluation of the software GUI. I collaborated with the Vice President, technical lead, and marketing team to develop a design that would balance the database query and information needs of the users, ease of transition to the new interface (learning efficiency), and development time and budget.

[Flash Prototype]