At the University of Michigan School of Information, I worked on a team project for SI 622: Evaluation of Systems and Services for the Michigan Ross School of Business, on the evaluation and analysis of their public site, in a project we called Project Ross. I worked with my team in conducting extensive usability evaluation and testing, and in the creation of written reports and deliverables for both the class and our client. By working closely with our client contacts, the advertising and media division of Ross, we were able to run through many levels and varieties of testing, including an interaction map, user interviews and developed personas and scenarios, a comparative evaluation of direct and indirect competitors, extensive user surveying across primary and secondary user groups, heuristic evaluations of the site by the project team, and finally in-person recorded and evaluated user testing of the site itself.

During the course of the study, the team presented each deliverable as a written report and short presentation to the Ross advertising and media team, and addressed their concerns and evaluations of our work. At the conclusion of the study, we also created and presented our findings as a large-scale final presentation, both for the class and our client, who had brought in staff members from other divisions to be informed about our work, and the status of their public site. They expressed gratitude for our work, which would allow them to concisely present concerns and the need for a revitalized site to their superiors.

Personally, I learned quite a bit from this experience, not only in learning the analysis techniques themselves, but in learning to operate closely with clients and users, and address their concerns effectively and efficiently. I also was personally responsible for creating the interaction map, and setting up the recording and testing usability systems. I also personally conducted most of the interviews, and the subsequent persona and scenario designs, which both I and the clients found extremely useful. In addition, I was able to gain experience with working with my team, and working on methods of cooperative work for our papers and deliverables.

At the University of Michigan School of Information, I worked on a team project for SI 682: Interface and Interaction Design called Project Peregrine. We choose to develop and create a prototype for a mobile social walking system through interest matching for submission in the CHI 2010 Interaction Design Student Competition, using the Contextual Design methodology. I worked with my team in developing an original concept, and in implementing Contextual Design through user testing and iterative design. Throughout the process, I cataloged and wrote-up our finding, research, recommendations and newest deliverables at our public website, so that not only were our results available, but our methodology and findings would be available as well, for a consistent in-progress snapshot of our work. The project culminated in an usability tested high-fidelity prototype, publicly available for both common web browsers and iPhone.

After the project and course was finished, I copywrote and submitted a short paper for the CHI 2010 Interaction Design Student Competition, and copywrote and co-designed a poster and text summary for the SI expoSItion 2010 Student Competition. Although we did not place in CHI 2010, we were awarded 2nd Place in the Social Computing Category at expoSItion.

I learned an enormous amount throughout this project- the Contextual Design process, team building, presentation work, and project management. I participated a great deal in the conceptualization, analysis, presentation and defense of the project, and throughout it, I was able to firsthand see the importance and power of user-centered design practices in the creation of a product. Our concept and execution used exclusively tried-and-true technology, yet by taking a unique approach to serving the needs of users in a unique way, we were able to create a powerful and potentially beneficial concept and project plan. Our final product was deeply influenced by our research and feedback, which took us in many fascinating directions that, without a user-centered approach, we would have been unable to conceive. This project cemented my interest in usability and user-centered approach to development and design, and gave me confidence in my career choices.

One of my favorite side projects was the design of my business card, which was initially spurred by a course assignment at the University of Michigan School of Information, SI 520: Graphic Design. I decided that rather than simply designing a conventional card, I would approach the business card as a UX problem, understand the ideal use of business cards by real users, and then design a card that would uniquely serve those needs. I only had about one week to design the cards, so I tried to keep the research and design process as simple and focused as possible. Even cursory research (and personal experience) showed me that the primary goal of the business card was to be informative, memorable, and ideally actually kept by the recipient of the card. Therefore, I researched the habits of those who were most effective at retaining and later using business cards, as well as the cognitive influences on impressions of people and on retaining objects and information.

I sought out students and instructors at my school who had experience with dealing with large volumes of business cards, and interviewed them (and in some lucky cases, saw their stocks of collected cards). It was immediately clear that the only people who managed to handle large quantities of cards were those who annotated cards immediately upon receiving them. The most common (and commonly shared) annotations were where the meeting took place, some sign of level of interest or importance for later contact, and the general impression of the card giver. Annotations were often done on the backs of cards as well. In addition, a great deal of research has already been done showing that when people manipulate or annotate small objects, they have a better chance of retaining them. It quickly became clear to me that a proper usable business card user experience would (a) support the actions of annotators and (b) help train non-annotators on the benefits of annotating their cards.

As such, I designed my business card with an easily filled form on the back side, and a relatively simple, informative front. I chose a vertical alignment as it best supported the back form section, and I added an indicating arrow to the front to signal the flipping of the card. I rotated part of the text on the front of the card to a horizontal position to encourage further manipulation of the card, and I added a small text section prompting the card flipping in a personable and non-commanding first person tone.

While designing the card’s back, I made sure to not simply allow the card’s user to indicate a priority for contact, as that would show and instruct that there would be a reason to not contact me. Instead, I created a series of checkboxes which were intentionally lighthearted and positive, with a few main serious contact reasons included. In this way, users who did not have a serious business related need to contact me would still see me as a positive social connection and keep the card. Similarly, I added a checkbox section for impressions, which were all clearly overwrought and overly positive, which was both humorous and, as research has shown, a priming mechanism to encourage a positive opinion. Also, as I am a generally light-hearted and non-serious person (which comes across quickly in person), this helped show and represent my personality and sociability, which further associated me to the card and improve recall for the user.

All in all, I was very pleased with the card and the extremely positive reception it received whenever I used it. I was extremely flattered when it was published on Lifehacker as an example of an interactive business card to help people remember you. I hope to continue to design unique interactive business cards in the future, using further user research, iterative design, and user testing.

Complete project site w/process, code, and visualizations available here

While at the University of Michigan School of Information, I performed an extensive exploratory data analysis project on hip-hop and rap music sampling behaviors, called Project In The Mix, for SI 618: Exploratory Data Analysis. As music sampling is a very important and current hot button issue in the legal definitions of Fair Use and copywrite, developing data explorations of such information is very relevant, especially those concerning sampling behavior. As the practice of uncleared sampling is dubiously legal, it is difficult to gain definite information about song samples present in music, especially in the genres of hip-hop and rap- however, publicly contributed databases have developed online of such information in an attempt to bridge the gap. I located a publicly available website of hip-hop and rap song sampling information, and used Perl scripts to scrub and format the data into a usable database. By running a number of exporatory analyses using R and the visual graphing and exploration package ggplot2, I was able to run analyses, using layering and factorization of data, as well as statistical methods of density charting and more. These tests led to several conclusions about sampling behavior, which I developed at the end into publication-ready graphics, again using ggplot2 and R.  Throughout the process of development, I published all my findings and work on a public website, and also developed some possible future areas of research into song sampling using my database and others.

This project taught me several new programming and statistical languages, as well as the overall power of visualization, and exploration through visualization. In addition, as my first major solo undertaking, I was able to be completely self-reliant on learning all of the necessary skills and languages for the project, which while very difficult and time-consuming, gave me a very broad and useful basis for future data analysis.

Together with the other intern, we worked to develop an information architecture that supported the very complex interactions among many user groups and collaborative/public groups, as well as creating a distinct branding and UI feel (which included iconography, copywriting, and interaction methods). We collaboratively created detailed, high fidelity and interactive mockups of the site using OmniGraffle. In addition,  I worked on developing a iPhone app interaction design that both reflected the unique UI feel of the site while conforming to iPhone interaction methods. I also worked with the other intern in developing a video walk-through to help introduce and instruct users.

I enjoyed a great deal of my experience at MemCatch, as it was a very fast-paced environment with a very small team, and I was able to learn a great deal from the developers, marketing staff, and the others I worked alongside daily. While MemCatch unfortunately ceased operation, I feel that the work I did there taught me a great deal about the process of UI and UX design, its importance in the development of a new service/product, and the importance of working closely with others outside of UX. It was a tremendous experience, and I wish all of my former coworkers well.

High Fidelity Prototype Mockup (PDF)

I came into the project in my capacity as a Cognitive Science student, as most of the team was trained and focused on the project from Computer Science and Linguistic perspectives. One of the goals of the project was to attempt to analyze discussion board content for emotional material, both for scholarly analysis and to assist instructors in monitoring their discussion boards for potential issues that needed their attention. Using my experiences in research, I performed several literature reviews and test analyses and developed several tagging criteria and methodologies that could identify certain important types of emotional content in a context-independent fashion. I personally tagged thousands of posts for NLP learning, and performed several types of preliminary analyses on these learning sets to attempt to identify trends. Using these results and results from the rest of my team, I copywrote a short paper for the Workshop on Computational Models for Natural Argument, Int’l Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI), 2009, which was accepted and I presented. Furthermore, our team submitted, was accepted, and presented a poster and short paper at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2010.

I learned an enormous amount from this project, and not all of it simply technical. It was the first time I had worked with an academic team, and I was given an enormous amount of leeway in developing my own approach and implementation. It was very frightening to go out on a limb for the project, but it was wildly rewarding to see my work take shape and be recognized. I am incredibly grateful to my principles in the project, who were consistently supportive and instructive, and I credit them with the success I was able to recognize in the project.

While at UCLA, I worked as an undergraduate research assistant for the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior in re-implementing a statistical analysis package for fMRI data, with several added analysis features. The original analysis package, SPMd, is a toolset for analysis of fMRI statistics and data for the SPM analysis package. The professor I was working with wanted a similar toolset, but for use with the FSL analysis package. He also wanted several different ways of exploring and analyzing the data, including several new statistical analyses. For most of the work, I had to deconstruct and use the SMPd functions, and implement a GUI for the data in MATLAB. For the new analyses, I worked with a Statistics post-doc. At several points in the project, I wrote up and presented my work for various classes. At the end of the project, I developed a crude but functional alpha of FSLd that was used for real analysis.

I really enjoyed this project, and it was the first project where I became interested in interfaces and visualization. I was fascinated by how the professor and his team used the statistical packages I was implementing- basically, they were able to quickly recognize and categorize areas of the extraordinarily complex data for later investigation simply by inspecting visualized maps of complex information. It both showed me the importance of visual recognition, and the necessity of supporting GUIs.