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The Kellstadt Graduate School of Business struggled with enrollment. The Director of Recruitment wanted to redesign their Admission section.
I enjoyed this project because I had the opportunity to conduct the entire UCD process. I squealed with delight when the changes we implemented based upon user research yielded great results.
See how I used usability tests and research to help redesigned the second most popular section of the website and boost its performance.
Real Talk is a VR Language Learning app for children ages 9-12 who are learning English. In this immersive reality game the children interact with characters in real time. Using a voice-recognition text to speech API from IBM's Watson the application provides children an opportunity to engage in unscripted conversations.
We built this application in two days at the first VR/AR Hackathon sponsored by MIT Media. Check out how we built it.
Stake Your Claim is a web-based application that helps urban community land trust sell investment property by using Augmented Reality to share 3D/360-video visualizations to entice investors to invest in future projects.
This was my idea culled from a chance meeting with a urban community land trust organizer. I submitted the idea for a grant and won! I completed UX research on the project and am now in Phase Two: Design.
Major Taylor Cycling Club of Chicago is a non-profit. It's mission is to offer opportunities for underserved populations to get into the sport of cycling. It's new chairman asked me to redesign the organization's website to boost membership.
By far my favorite part of creating a great user experience is doing usability research. I love interviewing users and testing prototypes with them because their keen insight are invaluable to inform good design. Check out this project for a new smartphone application that was designed to make it easier for users to keep food diaries and help them lose weight. Though this product did not get made in the end, this is a good example of how I work with users during usability testing and exploratory research.
In April 2014 I participated in my Overnight Website Challenge, hosted by the Nerdery. I was paired with a eight guys and one cool chick that I didn't know to redesign a website for the non-profit Friends of the Park in one night. It was horrifyingly awesome.
Fresh from scripting and programming class I put my CSS and Javascript skills to work to create the landing page and its interactions including the photo gallery and the middle moving icons. Also helped with the UI/IX and UX with the self-described tech-challenged employees of the nonprofit. Check out the full website here.
Favorite Text Editor: Sublime Text 2, but also like Dreamweaver
Server: Ironprincess: Built my own server to run the PHP and AJAX functions for a couple of webpages I created.
I do most of my coding prototyping on JSFiddle. It allows me to run basic CSS/HTML even JavaScript and AJAX files so I can see how the code works without worrying about images etc., and file folder management. Also it runs code really fast and gives me a look at real time design and functionality changes without rendering delays.
Here's a basic program I wrote with HTML/CSS/JavaScript that allows you to convert minutes to days. I'm going to change the design it's appalling but it shows you the basic function programs I can write.
The Challenge: Create an application that allows people to keep a food diary without all the pesky data inputs current mobile applications have.
Our Solution: Magic, a mobile food diary app that allows you to track what you ate, how much and calories consumed with your phone camera.
Tools Used: Balsamiq, and pen and paper.
Check out user-testing video to see how users did with our paper prototypes. :)
Mobile first is a design philosophy that has nothing to do with device and everything to do with starting with a commitment to clean, efficient and pleasing design. So I do design for mobile no matter the screen size because it keeps me honest. Here I redesign an e-commerce product page for mobile and tablet screensizes.
My mother is elderly and I had been trying to think of a way to make sure she took all her meds, ate and had groceries each day without having to have an hour phone call. :) My team and I came up with the "Caretaker Mobile App."
See how we created this prototype.
Tools used: Axure and PhotoShop and Popapp, laptop video camera
This is an application I created with my partner Elaina Boytnor. The user experience, user task flow and the concept of communicating from mobile through cable television was my idea to bridge the gap between older citizens and their adult caretaker children.
To develop our own set of AI and Ethics guiding principles, we started with people. We talked to folks all across the globe: We interviewed IDEO teams about where they found challenges. We spoke to our clients about where they saw intelligent systems go awry. We spoke to the public about where smart designs seemed to cross lines. We observed and read about AI systems that had gone off the rails and worked to understand how this might have been avoided. We learned a lot.
We came up with an original design, iterated on them, and landed on a set of four design principles and ten activities that can help guide an ethically responsible, culturally considerate, and humanistic approach to designing with data. These activities are meant to provoke thought; they’re a vehicle for introducing new ideas and stimulating conversations around ethics throughout the design process.
