Just some finer moments from my Carnegie Mellon days.

What have I been up to more recently? See more current work on my main portfolio.

informare

Class: Innovation in Information Systems (67-475)
Semester: Fall 2015
Technologies: Ruby on Rails, Zurb Foundation, postgres, HTML, CSS, Adobe Illustrator, Pinterest, Google Forms
Skills: User Experience Design, Brainstorming, Sketching, User Testing, User Research, Data Analysis
Code Repository
Final Presentation 

informare aims to unbiasedly inform American citizens about political issues in engaging ways so that they feel educated enough to vote. The application contains a game feature that allows the user to guess which presidential candidate said a certain quote about a certain topic, and then keeps track of their score (how many questions they got right total) and streak (how many questions they got right in a row). There is also an exploratory tool that encourages users to explore political issues. While users are exploring issues, they are presented with quotes that candidates said that they can like and then later manage to see which candidate said the most things they agree with.

For this project, my main role was a User Experience Designer and Front-End Developer. I wrote and distributed a survey that asked users about how they feel about politics and how educated they feel about many political issues. I then made sketches, a mood board and design language in order to figure out our interaction and visual design. Once we had a working developed prototype of the app, I conducted a user test on five American citizens, asking them to think aloud as they interacted with the app, and asked them to perform certain actions that our app offered. I took the problems I found back to the team, and we were able to solve many of them, especially problems with information hierarchy. Additionally, for our exploratory tool, I researched and wrote content for twelve different topics. I then designed the information that my partner and I wrote for all the topics using HTML, CSS and information design practices.

Xeno

Class: Mobile Application Development in iOS (67-442)
Semester: Fall 2015
Technologies: Swift 1.2, Xcode 6.4
Skills: Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework, Grand Central Dispatch, Refactoring, Optionals, Closures, Outlets, Responsive Design, Visual Design
Code Repository
Final Presentation 

Xeno aims to eliminate xenophobia by asking the user a variety of true/false questions about racism, sexism, homo/transphobia, religiocentrism, and ableism. Through answering the questions, the user's score and, ideally, their awareness, increases if they answer a question correctly.

I made sure that my application worked on every size screen, including when the devices are rotated. Based on extensive research, I wrote all the questions myself.

Presente

Class: Innovation in Information Systems (67-475)
Semester: Fall 2015
Technologies: Swift 2.0, Xcode 7, Estimote Beacon, Parse, Adobe Illustrator, Balsamiq, Google Forms
Skills: User Experience Design, Sketching, User Testing, User Interviews, User Research, Data Analysis

Presente uses Estimote beacon technology to automatically track attendance for professors. When a student walks into class, the physical Estimote beacon detects the presence of their iPhone within a certain range set by the professor, and their attendance would be automatically tracked during each of their class sessions. Gone are the days of sign-in sheets killing paper and roll-call killing class time.

My role on my three-person team was a User Experience Designer. I drew our initial sketches of the application, and then iterated on those sketches by producing wireframes with Balsamiq. I then got user feedback by interviewing two professors, three students, and collecting responses from 162 students via an online survey. Based on that feedback, I iterated further on the designs by making a mood board and design language based on the notion of our users feeling academically inclined and responsible while using Presente. I then used the design language to create three more iterations of high-fidelity mock-ups, which the team developed using the Swift programming language and Parse for a database.

collab.cmu.io

Class: Innovation in Information Systems (67-475)
Semester: Fall 2015
Technologies: Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap
Skills: Database Design, Front-End Development

collab is a site where members of the Carnegie Mellon community can find collaborators, from professors looking for teaching assistants to students seeking research experience to student organizations looking for someone to fill a leadership position. Instead of your average jobs board where it is solely the responsibility of the job seeker to find collaboration opportunities, collab makes this process a two-way street by allowing job seekers to also post about their skill sets and opportunities they are pursuing. We accomplish this by having two boards that users can post to: "Projects Seeking Talent" and "Talent Seeking Projects." Additionally, to ensure that this board stay within the CMU community, we require each email that users use to sign up and log in is a CMU-associated email (ending in @andrew.cmu.edu, @cmu.edu, etc.).

I played a large role on this team in the initial brainstorming phase, the wireframing and interaction design iteration phases, the creation of user stories, and the Ruby on Rails development. I created our entity-relationship diagram and data dictionary before we began developing. We used a gem called devise that helped us set up user authentication. I also gained experience using Bootstrap to lay out the front end. Instead of creating mockups in Illustrator like I normally do, we decided to design in code and iterate that way. This method worked well for us considering we only had two weeks to complete this project.

Pittsburgh Kindness Initiative

Class: Software Development Project (67-373)
Semester: Spring 2015
Technologies: Wordpress, HTML, CSS, HotGloo, draw.io, Adobe Illustrator, Google Forms
Skills: User Interviews, Client Relationship Management, Project Management
Final Product
Final Report

My team and I developed a website for the Pittsburgh Kindness Initiative (PKI) as consultants. The Pittsburgh Kindness Initiative's mission is simply to spread kindness in Pittsburgh and beyond, and to track how far their kindness goes by encouraging people to pay the kindness forward. Before our consulting advice, the PKI would give a paper business card to whoever they did a kind act for, but there was no way for them to see how far their kindness was paid forward. Our team built and designed this website and new plastic, trackable business cards for the PKI so that people who received the cards could log onto the website and tell their kindness story. Users can also see other stories associated with their card's tracking number, thus seeing how far the kindness has spread.

We used Wordpress for a content management system, in addition to a multitude of plugins. My main role on the team was the Content Manager and Front End Lead. I wrote the majority of the content for our pages and cards. I made wireframes of our site in its initial stages. I conducted user interviews, including ones with members of Project Smile, a campus organization dedicated to spreading happiness, to gauge what kindness means to our users. Also, I edited the HTML and CSS of our template in order to optimize it for our purposes. 

Gophr

Class: Designing Human Centered Software (05-391)
Semester: Spring 2015
Technologies: iOS, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AngularJS, mongoDB, ionic, heroku, Facebook API, Adobe Illustrator, iMovie
Skills: Wireframing, Low and High Fidelity Mockups, Moodboard, Design Language, Storyboard, Video Editing
Final Product (optimized for a mobile-sized screen)
Final Report
Pitch Video
Overview Video

With Gophr, an iPhone application, users can buy and sell items locally to their friends and neighbors. Gophr's interface is similar to Tinder in that the user swipes left if they are not interested in an item, and swipes right to inquire about the item.

My role on my team of six was a User Experience Designer. I contributed heavily to the initial wireframes and mockups of our app, and conducted a multitude of user tests and interviews. From these, I made a storyboard for our app, demonstrating a typical user story. I then iterated on our mood board and design language, making sure that users felt relaxed yet excited while using our app. I contributed to writing the CSS in our application so that our design language would be used properly. To present our app at our final critique, I made our team's poster, demonstrating all the main ideas and information about Gophr. I also did the majority of the shooting and editing of our Overview Video and Pitch Video.

BriefScape

Class: Design of Educational Games (05-418)
Semester: Spring 2015
Technologies: Adobe Illustrator, Google Draw
Skills: Sketching, Wireframing, Low and High Fidelity Mockups, Moodboard, Design Language, Brainstorming, Playtesting, Cognitive Task Analysis
Final Report

BriefScape is a board game centered around teaching novices to the job search essential job- and internship-hunting skills, such as resume writing, elevator pitching, and answering behavioral interview questions.

I identified the problem at hand by brainstorming ideas for subjects that students want to learn about in a fun, encouraging way. Before we started creating the game, we conducted a cognitive task analysis where we interviewed and tested novices to the job search to see which areas were the most problematic or confusing to them.

My partner and I first sketched out some possible ideas for game boards and questions that the game would ask. We concluded that the game should consist of two different kinds of questions: Knowledge questions and Application questions. Knowledge questions would test the players' objective knowledge of resumes, elevator pitches and interviews, while Application questions would prompt the player to practice the skills associated with these three learning objectives. We decided to run with the briefcase-related design because a briefcase is an iconic job symbol, and the objective of the game is to escape from the briefcase and into the real world.

From there, we created a first prototype of the game board, a mood board, and design language. I then made our second, higher-fidelity iteration of the board, which we playtested with ten players. After the playtesting session, we made some final tweaks to the game board, questions, rubrics, player pieces, and rules. 

Smart Bedroom iPad App

Class: Fundamentals of System Development (67-371)
Semester: Fall 2014
Technologies: Adobe Illustrator
Skills: Wireframing, Low and High Fidelity Mockups, Sketching, Interaction Design
Final Report

I designed the user interface of an iPad application that would control every aspect of a "smart bedroom" in a smart home. The application integrates many features of smart homes that already exist into one platform and makes them all work together in a way that allows the user to customize their bedroom while being informed of their habits and saving money on heating and electricity. 

I played the role of Interaction Designer on this project, as I helped define requirements, drew wireframes and iterated on the final designs for our application. I also helped design the poster we used for our final presentation of this project.

Pantree

Class: Interaction Design Overview (05-392)
Semester: Fall 2014
Technologies: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Google Drive
Skills: Wireframing, Low and High Fidelity Mockups, Sketching, Moodboard, Design Language, Storyboard, Personas, User Research

Pantree allows the user to build a shopping list and have the groceries delivered to their house. As the user continues to order groceries with the app, their shopping list will be automatically populated with items that they regularly buy.

Our persona for this application is a busy mother of three young children named Alicia Henry. Our research indicated that busy mothers of young children find it annoying and time consuming to go to the grocery store on a daily basis, especially if they have to bring their kids and especially if they also have other errands to run. Alicia wants to spend as little time on grocery shopping and as much time with her family as possible.

We wanted our application to have a relaxing feel to it while still being exciting to use, so we chose design language that we believed would accomplish that. We derived our design language from our mood board, which also strived to create a serene, healthy feeling.

Our team made many storyboards and iterations for this project. Our earlier iterations made us realize that our application was too complicated at first, so we had to rethink our requirements and design language multiple times. Our application evolved a lot during this project, and we were very happy with the final product.

Chess Camp Application

Class: Application Design and Development (67-272)
Semester: Spring 2014
Technologies: Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, GitHub, Google Maps API
Skills: Model-View-Controller framework (MVC), authentication, authorization, geolocation, database design, refactoring, nested forms, CRUD functionality
Code Repository

I built a Ruby on Rails application designed for an imaginary chess camp in my Application Design and Development class my second semester sophomore year. I was one of five people in a class of about sixty students who won an award for design on their final project phase in this class.

The application had to effectively display information about all the camps, curricula, locations, instructors, and registrations. To create authentication, we created a user model with login functionality. We had three different user types that we had to create the appropriate authorization for: administrators who had all possible privileges when logged in, instructors who had limited privileges when logged in, and parents who did not log in but looked at the application for information about upcoming camps for their children. 

To create this application, the class used Git for version control. I used the model-view-controller framework to organize my code, creating the model code first, testing it extensively, and then writing the view and controller code. The chess camp application contains the integration of interactive Google Maps and nested forms. 

Bajaj Foundation Interactive Map

Class: Sustainable Social Change (79-318)
Semester: Spring 2014
Technologies: Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, GitHub, Google Maps API
Skills: Model-View-Controller framework (MVC), authentication, authorization, geolocation, database design, CRUD functionality
Final Product

A partner and I built an interactive map application for the Bajaj Foundation, an organization that fosters social change in villages of rural India. The goal of this application was to help the Bajaj Foundation keep track of what activities were taking place at which villages in a geographically-displayed manner. The application contains an interactive, scrollable and zoomable Google Map with clickable markers, authentication and authorization, and CRUD functionality. 

Andy Warhol Exhibit Website

Class: Information Systems Milieux (67-250)
Semester: Fall 2013
Technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Google Maps API
Skills: Cascading content, interactive thumbnails, contact forms

I designed and built a website for a fictional Andy Warhol exhibit for my Information System Milieux class. I used my knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create a consistent color scheme, cascading content, and interactive thumbnails that enlarged and showed more detail when clicked on. This website also contains a contact form and two Google Maps. 

Dig Dug Remix

Class: Fundamentals of Programming and Computer Science (15-112)
Semester: Spring 2013
Technologies: Python, Pygame
Skills: sorting methods, Big O efficiency, recursion, classes and inheritance, binary trees

Dig Dug Remix is a more modernized version of the classic Namco game Dig Dug, complete with updated gameplay, difficulty, and background music.