R&D PROJECT

Team Special Projects, Server Technology Research, Oracle

Role UI Project Lead, Founding Engineer, Interaction Designer

Team Description Special Projects is an R&D group at Oracle developing the next generation technology for information management and databases. The individuals in the group consist of leaders in both industry and academia. Special Projects operates like a startup within Oracle.

Responsibilities
- Interaction Design & Usability: wireframing of user interaction sequences; quick prototyping in flex to validate interactions; informal user testing and documenting usability issues.
- UI Engineering: primary contributor in laying out UI software architecture; software development in flex.
- Project lead: managing and tracking product features and development.

Project details and Artifacts Confidential (Oracle Restricted)

PIXAURA

Advisor Steven M. Drucker, Microsoft Live Labs

Role Technical Lead, Interaction Designer

Description Pixaura introduces new concepts to the digital photo realm, which empower users to select photos in a flexible, yet supportive environment. Pixaura also bridges the gap between triaging and sharing, accounting for the dynamic needs of sharing for various audiences.

Pixaura provides the tools and support for making decisions, without imposing a specific order of action. By creating a playful, flexible, and rewarding experience, Pixaura promotes interacting with and sharing photos as a leisure time activity.

Artifacts Academic Paper | Complete Report | Video Demo | Final Website | Presentation

GUIDED HANDWRITING

Advisor Shekhar Borgaonkar, Hewlett-Packard Labs

Role Interaction Designer, Developer

Description Keyboards, whether conventional or “soft”, are difficult to use especially for Indic scripts which have a large number of symbols (comprising of consonants, vowels and dependent vowels). The consonants can be modified by one or more dependent vowels to form a syllable. So, data entry using these keyboards involves the use of multiple “shift” modes and many key combinations that are cumbersome and require a steep learning curve; thus, making it difficult to use for novice users. Though handwriting input is most natural, the unreliability of the current recognition technology renders it inappropriate for continuous data entry.

Guided Handwriting is an alternative approach for data entry, which is a predictive writing input method environment. It is based on interactively arriving at the intended character using partial handwriting input and other cues from the user. This kind of input mechanism makes data entry in Indic scripts more convenient and intuitive than what was possible before.

Artifacts Confidential (HP Restricted)

WHISPERMOBILE

Advisor Prof. Jason I. Hong, Human-Computer Interaction Institute

Role Interaction Designer, Developer

Description WhisperMobile is mobile social system for creating, sharing, and finding social events over mobile phones. Using WhisperMobile, people can create new events and then organize friends to go to an event. People can also find local events nearby, as well as find events of interest based on a previously defined web profile.

Artifacts Academic Paper (Includes screenshots)

DARPA COORDINATORS: INTERACTIVE VISUALIZATION

Client Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

Role Usability Engineer, Interaction Designer

Description Our team designed an interactive visualization to analyze the performance and schedule of automated software "agents" in a multi-agent scheduling system in a distributed environment.

Artifacts Presentation (Includes screenshots)

SHAPE - Scavenger Hunt And Puzzle Environment

Course Interface and Interaction Design

Role Interaction Designer, Project Manager, Developer

Description SHAPE is a system to allow users to create and play location based scavenger hunts on cooperatively developed maps that reflect the real world. It consists of three major components. The first is a system to explore and play the games in, which will be the most used part, and our primary focus. Next is the game creation toolkit where users build the hunts for other users to play. Finally we have the map creation system where users dynamically create maps to play on.

Artifacts Report | Demo (opens in a new window) | Presentation

PAGE EDITOR

Course Software Architecture for User Interfaces

Role Interaction Designer, Developer

Description This project involves extending a firefox web developer tool. Page Editor is essentially an extension that is used by developers to debug webpages.  Our goal in editing this extension is to both enable editing functionality within the extension as well as provide a UI for doing that editing.  The end goal is something along the lines of a dreamweaver like web development tool that would be able to run within the browser.  More realistically for this project we provided a basic toolbox of items to insert into a page and a property inspector and editor.  This toolbox will overlay on the web page the user is currently viewing when they enable the edit session.  The properties box is locked at the bottom of the page and can be minimized to reduce screen real estate.  The toolbox appears at the top right but can be dragged around throughout the page.

Other features that were implemented are: Direct manipulation of Anchor Text, Interactive image resizing, and drag-and-drop positioning of images.

Artifacts Software (Available upon request)

REDESIGN OF BLOGGER

Course HCI Methods - Fall 2006

Role Usability Engineer, Communication Designer

Description In the course of our study of HCI methods, our team gathered, organized, and applied data from a variety of methods, and undertook a partial redesign of the Blogger web service to better serve the needs of the users. These methods included Affinity Diagramming, Contextual Inquiry, Keystroke-Level Modeling, Heuristic Evaluation, Cognitive Walkthrough, and Think-Aloud.

Artifacts Report

REDESIGN OF PAT PAYMENT SYSTEM

Course Interface and Interaction Design - Spring 2007

Role Interaction Designer

Description For this project, we decided to study how users interact with the fare payment system on Pittsburgh buses. From personal experience, we felt that this was a rich source of design breakdowns, and we were not disappointed.

To study this interaction, we rode buses from Squirrel Hill to Downtown during rush hour. We positioned ourselves so we would have the maximum chance to observe each rider making his or her payment, and noted the method of payment, the timing (when getting on or off), and the bus driver’s reaction to the payment sequence. As a part of our final deliverable. we created a video sketch illustrating the problem and the solution.

Artifacts Report | Video Sketch

BOOKLET DESIGN

Course Communication Design Fundamentals

Role Communication Designer

Description In this assignment I designed a booklet consisting of three popular typography articles.

Artifacts Booklet | Cover

QUOTE DESIGN

Course Communication Design Fundamentals

Role Communication Designer

Description This is an expressive quote design. I chose Ursula Le Guin's quote -

"It is good to have an end to journey toward
but it is the journey that matters in the end."

The design tries to visually emphasize the meaning of the quote.

Artifacts Version 1 | Version 2