Introduction to
Human-Computer Interaction Methods

Assignment: Design a system to allow shoppers to collaborate and perform a retrospective analysis of the HCI methods.The objectives are to practice documentation of design rationale in terms of HCI analyses and to reflect on the strengths and limitations of the methods you have learned and applied.

Solution: Inspired by all of the data from our studies, we determined that in order to design a successful tool to help people agree on the end product, we would need to support:

Documentation: Provide an easy way to track details on what had already been viewed through multiple mediums.
Learning: To encourage enjoyable discussions about tastes and preferences such that eventually you can better predict what will be liked among your shopping group.
Efficiency: Improve the overall speed and usability of thought transfer in making a mutually agreed upon decision.

Our design focuses on solving these key issues by gathering people around a physical space to promote more personal discussions during the shopping process. We've designed a digital table on a software platform aptly named Peruse, where preferences are stored in personal spaces such that users can easily view overlaps in interests and dislikes.

Peruse: Final Paper :: Prototype :: Contextual Inquiry

Application Design and Development

Assignment: The Western Pennsylvania Chess Club (WPCC) is a small chess club for scholastic players in the region to come together for tournaments, classes and times of open play. The WPCC has an online presence that can be seen at www.pghchess.org. The site was created by a group of volunteers at the WPCC and the board of directors is grateful for the pro bono work they provided. Nonetheless, the WPCC board also recognizes that the current site is lacking in certain areas and is looking for some help to redesign and extend the current site and its functionality. Having a very limited budget for this type of work, the WPCC has hired you as a technical consultant due to your remarkable skills and low rates (i.e., pro bono). Your task is to redesign the site and to add some additional functionality that is described later in this narrative.

Solution: A thorough database redesign was in order to add functionality of signing up for chess courses and tournaments effectively. A visual redesign was also helpful in establishing a trustworthy image. The process involved the creation of an entity-relationship diagram, database dictionary, use-case description, and Ruby on Rails development.

Wireframes :: Database Design :: Screenshots

Fundamentals of Systems Development

Assignment: The research office at a renowned university yearly hosts an International research conference. The conference is growing, attracting an increasing number of paper submissions. Managing the review process (submission of papers, review of quality and decision on papers acceptance) is becoming a daunting task. The research office hence decided to develop an International Conference review system (ICRS) to manage the papers review. You are appointed to take on the systems development of ICRS.

Solution: The Agile Unified Process approach helped us flesh out a detailed analysis of the project requirements and the steps we would need to incorporate in our development phase. By focussing on simplicity, user requirements and stakeholder input, we were able to determine process-critical features which formed the framework for our system design.

We used timeboxed iteration phases over a period of three weeks to refine and expand our project vision, which allowed us to plan the core architecture of the ICRS. In doing so, we revised our overall schedule and allocation of resources to accomidate the expansion of our system.

Final Paper

Basic Interaction

Course Projects: There were too many projects for this course to bother placing it on this page, so here you can find some of my work from a course I took in Spring 2008 taught by Jamin Hegeman.

Social Web

Assignment: Work in teams to propose a final project that relates to the topics covered over the course semester including: Welcoming newcomers, Privacy, Encouraging Contribution, and the Wisdom of Crowds. The end result should be the design of a social web site or a modification / criticism of an existing social web site. The final paper should include a retrospective of the design methods used as well as a summary of the key findings during project research.

Solution: A Facebook application called EventPlus, which optimizes Facebook's event application for collaborative (social) event planning.