THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

TWO SEMESTER MASTER'S PROJECT

COMPLETE CONCEPT, RESEARCH, DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

For my Master’s Project at Georgia Tech, I wanted to do something that combined my three primary research interests in the program: Interface Design, Interaction Design and Data Visualization. I also wanted the topic to pique interest of a wide range of people; I settled on the subject of personal happiness. I collected state-level data about America, related to factors that are commonly identified as things that can impact happiness and/or improve quality of life. I categorized these factors as Social, Cultural, Economic or Environmental and came up with a final list based on a survey of potential users of the system.

The final product is currently in development. It will be a website where users can define their own formula for happiness and then see a graphical representation of how happy they’d be in each of the 50 states considering their chosen factors. My primary goals for the project are to present a large amount of data in a quickly understandable way, and to create an engaging experience that users will want to repeat and share.

MEDIA: FINAL HOMEPAGE WIREFRAME

FLUPON MOBILE APPLICATION

ONE MONTH MOBILE APPLICATION DESIGN AND PROTOTYPING PROJECT

COMPLETE CONCEPT, RESEARCH, DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

This project was completed for a class entitled Visual Culture and Design, in which we were instructed to develop an innovative mobile application to help people prevent or treat influenza. I began by using the design synthesis method of reframing to consider the needs and activities of flu sufferers, and I realized that while having the flu is difficult for anybody, it can become markedly worse for people with limited resources.

I decided to build an application with these people in mind, and ended up with Flupon, a location-based mobile app for people trying to survive the flu on a budget. It provides useful information about where to get common flu necessities cheaply by taking in a user's location and comparing that with data from the weekly circulars of local grocery stores and pharmacies. It also contains information about nearby clinics and flu shot providers.

After two rounds of wireframes, I built a prototype to present using jQuery Mobile.

MLB $ PER WIN DATA VISUALIZATION

ONE MONTH DATA VISUALIZATION DESIGN AND PROTOTYPING PROJECT

COMPLETE CONCEPT, RESEARCH, DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

This project was completed for a class entitled The Computer as an Expressive Medium. The assignment was to create an artifact that allows users to meaningfully navigate through a substantial data set. When I think substantial data sets, my first thought is often baseball statistics.

In particular, I wanted to create a data visualization that would examine how wisely each team spends their money. Since there is no limit to what baseball teams can pay their players, the sport is commonly thought of as divided between the haves and the have-nots. But does this large discrepancy in spending actually correlate with wins on the field? To examine this question, I created an interactive line chart in which the teams of Major League Baseball are ranked by how many dollars they spent on player salaries for each game won, from the years 1990–2010.

Since success in the playoffs is what each team is really striving for, I gave unique markers to the data points in which a team made the playoffs, won their league, or won the World Series. Clicking a data point will populate the data window in the upper right corner of the screen with information about that specific team and year. Additionally, holding down the left mouse button on a point will highlight that team’s entire line, so users can clearly see the trends over the 20-year span, along with all the successes and failures along the way.

I built this project in the programming language Processing, which is based on Java.

Note: The prototype might take a minute to appear due to the amount of data that needs to be loaded in. Also, some users may receive an error message warning of "potentially unsafe" content due to the use of an external Processing library. I assure you it’s fine.

SPX iPAD APPLICATION: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

TWO WEEK INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE ASSIGNMENT

RESEARCH AND SITE MAPPING

How can an iPad app support an industrial giant’s massive product line? I worked on this project for two weeks during my time at Nurun. During this time, I worked with the SPX Account team and other UX staff on what was essentially a giant IA issue. SPX manufactures products for every major consumer product industry and distributes them across the globe. Additionally, there are dozens of distinct brands beneath the SPX umbrella. What, then, is the best way to segment and organize that mass of information to allow users to find what they need quickly and easily?

I assisted mainly in the research portion of this project and aided in the production of several documents that communicated the structure of the information to be featured in the application, as well as potential paths to navigate through that structure.

MEDIA: DRAFT OF SITEMAP AND USERFLOW

MANHEIM SIMULCAST CONCEPT WIREFRAMES

ONE MONTH WIREFRAMING PROJECT

HEURISTIC EVALUATION OF EXISTING PRODUCT, DEVELOPMENT OF DESIGN RATIONALE AND WIREFRAME CONCEPTS

Manheim is a company that specializes in vehicle auction services for licensed buyers. The Manheim Simulcast product brings that experience online, and allows buyers to tune in to the auctioneer, engage in bidding wars, and purchase cars for their dealerships from anywhere in the world. Manheim came to Nurun to explore future possibilities for the interface and interaction design of the Simulcast product, to create a more engaging and information-rich experience for their customers.

I began my work on this project by conducting a heuristic usability evaluation of the current Simulcast product. I used the application from the Buyer, Seller and Auctioneer perspectives and spotted potential interaction design issues in each interface, rating them by their severity. I then produced wireframes for several interface concepts based on Manheim’s requirements, user-centered design methodologies and current data visualization techniques.

MEDIA: WIREFRAME CONCEPTS FOR THREE USERS

FOOD LABEL REDESIGN

THREE WEEK DESIGN THINKING AND GRAPHIC DESIGN EXERCISE

COMPLETE RESEARCH AND DESIGN

This project was completed for a class entitled Visual Culture and Design and inspired by a contest from GOOD Magazine. The question was simple: how can the information on the current food label be redesigned to create a more informative and instructive experience for shoppers? For direction, I turned to the Food and Drug Administration’s own explanation of the food label, which includes some key information that is unclear in the current design. First, that people should limit consumption of the first group of nutrients on the label, while making sure they get enough of the second group. The FDA also specifies that a serving of food is considered “high” in a nutrient if it provides more than 20% of one’s recommended daily value, and “low” if it provides less than 5%.

I also considered reframing how the notion of “ideal” daily caloric intake is expressed, and also how food labels should consider serving size (the product I chose to work with was bread, of which people rarely eat one slice at a time).

For my final design, I used a basic bar chart to give the reader a visual representation of nutrient levels, and I set the scale of the chart to help the reader view the daily value percentages in terms of the FDA’s low and high values, rather than a 0-100% scale (because any individual food item will likely be a small part of what a person is actually consuming in an entire meal, let alone in a day). I varied the colors of the chart’s reference lines (using a culturally significant red and green scheme) to create visual distinction between ingredients that one should ensure consumption of and ones whose consumption should be limited.

MEDIA: FINAL DESIGN

THE PARTIES' PRIORITIES IN CONGRESS

ONE SEMESTER GROUP DATA VISUALIZATION PROJECT

CONCEPT, DATA COLLECTION AND INTERACTION DESIGN

This project was completed with two other students as the semester project for a class entitled Information Visualization. The concept came from a desire to see if stereotypes about the priorities of America’s two most popular political parties hold true when looking at raw spending numbers. We collected the party affiliations of each state's Governor, Senators and House Reps from the years 1989 to 2009. For that same time period, we also collected spending data for each state (i.e. the percentage of the states’ total budget allocated to each of six major categories: Elementary/Secondary (Lower) Education, Higher Education, Public Assistance, Medicaid, Corrections and Transportation).

We attempted to maximize the flexibility with which users can interact with the data. Users can view states' political affiliations by Senators, Governor or House Reps and compare spending categories on a scatterplot that is supplemental to the main map visualization. There is an additional line chart on the screen that allows the user to look at a single spending variable over time and see if spending in a certain category went up or down after the ruling party switched. States can also be compared with one another on this chart.

Myself and two other students were responsible for the entire concept, research, design and development of the system. The system was designed using Adobe Illustrator and built with Adobe Flex to run as a prototype on a single machine.

Note: Watch the video in full screen to read notes about the system’s functionality.

FARMSENSE

ONE MONTH GROUP DESIGN THINKING AND PROJECT DOCUMENTATION EXERCISE

CONCEPT, RESEARCH AND PRESENTATION

I worked in a group of five students within the Public Design Workshop at Georgia Tech to complete this project, which came together in response to a single overarching question: How can participatory design and modern robotics/sensing technologies aid the world of small-scale agriculture? We began the project by meeting with a small-scale organic farmer and taking a tour of his farm, located just outside of Atlanta. We took this opportunity to take notes about the farmer’s land and farming setup, and the overall ethos of what he does. We discovered that the values of permaculture influence every activity on the farm, and that any recommendation that did not tie in with those values would not be good enough. We then took our notes and photos and attempted to combine them with our knowledge of modern sensing technologies, such as nutrient and moisture sensors, to develop an idea that would be fit for the Funny Farm.

What followed was two weeks of ideation, sketching and cost research that eventually turned into FarmSense, a system by which sensor stakes with infrared lightbulbs on top could be planted in various locations around the farm and flash their readings to a video camera on top of the farmer's nearby house. The video would then be transferred and mapped by a software program that would inform the farmer of specific areas lacking in moisture or certain nutrients, so that he can use his water and fertilizer supplies as efficiently as possible.

Finally, we invited our farmer friend to the Public Design Workshop at Tech and presented our concept to him.

MEDIA: FINAL PRESENTATION SLIDES

HISTORYSCAPE INTERACTIVE WALL

ONE SEMESTER GROUP HCI PROJECT

CONCEPT, RESEARCH, DESIGN, USABILITY TESTING AND PRESENTATION

Over the course of a semester, myself and three other group members were responsible for creating, developing, testing and presenting a prototype of an innovative new experience around the general theme of education. Given that the city of Atlanta has so much historical significance, we felt that that would be a good place to turn for inspiration. We settled on a concept that would pair historical events with the actual landscape and allow people to experience various related media as well as contribute their own personal stories about how historical events have touched and shaped their lives. We wanted to create a system that would allow people to teach as well as learn, expanding their own knowledge of the city and their fellow citizens.

We came up with three design alternatives, including augmented reality glasses and a smartphone application, but we eventually decided to recommend an interactive wall as the best implementation for our concept. We made this decision primarily because a wall would become a fixture in the community, and it would be available to those who can’t necessarily afford smartphones or other high-tech equipment. The wall would further build a sense of community by being something that multiple people can use together.

Of course, we did lack the time and financial resources to build a touch-sensitive interactive wall prototype. So we did the next best thing and projected an HTML prototype on the wall. We conducted usability tests by having one of our group members click through as testing participants “interacted with the wall.” We then collected data from these tests and iterated on our concept before a final presentation to the class.

MEDIA: POSTER COMPARING DESIGN ALTERNATIVES AND FINAL INTERFACE CONCEPT

AUTOTRADER.COM SEARCH RESULTS AND VEHICLE DETAIL PAGES

SIX MONTH WEBSITE FUNNEL REDESIGN

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE AND COPYWRITING

When I worked as a Content Designer at AutoTrader.com, I was part of a project team responsible for redesigning the highest-traffic area of the site, which at the time was attracting roughly 10 million monthly unique visitors (the number is now greater than 15 million uniques/month). The team consisted of myself and two other designers, several developers, a Product Manager and a Project Manager.

Following a waterfall development process, the design team was responsible for creating wireframes, comps and a copy document based on a lengthy requirements document and weekly check-ins with key stakeholders. The pages we were responsible for redesigning were the Search Form, Search Results Page (SRP) and Vehicle Detail Page (VDP), and we developed several new concepts that explored the ideal visual treatment to differentiate listing tiers, as well as the information architecture of how vehicle information should be grouped and organized within each listing.

The project team also planned several usability tests and iterated based on what we learned from behind the two-way glass.

In a later phase of the project, the team conducted research, design, technical explorations and usability testing of the possibility of adding filters to the SRP. This posed even more interesting Interaction Design and Information Architecture questions, which the user-centered design process helped us answer.

MEDIA: SCREENSHOT OF SRP FILTERS

MISCELLANEOUS COPYWRITING

BOOTH RESEARCH SERVICES: HOMEPAGE COPY

AUTO SHOW WHEELSTAND DISPLAY: FORD GIUGIARO CONCEPT MUSTANG

NAPA AUTO PARTS EMPLOYMENT SITE: EMPLOYEE PROFILE

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA VET SCHOOL WEBSITE: STUDENT LIFE