As a semester long project, we designed a fitness application that supports resistance training using the Android mobile platform. This application allows users to set fitness goals to customize their workouts. Based on the selected fitness goals, users can select from a number of workouts types or exercises according to muscle group. Users can log their progress for an exercise and view statistics that display their progress over time. For project details please check out our website.

Knowing that we wanted to create an Android mobile application related to fitness and health, we constructed a user survey to understand current practices and motivations for being active and for not engaging in physical activity.Following the interviews, our team conducted two rounds of interpretation sessions. These sessions were completed to capture highlights as well as dive deeper into the responses of the interviewees. The notes we captured in our interpretation sessions were used to create our affinity diagram. We started this design process by reading off our notes and placing them on our board. Gradually notes with similar topics began to organically form groups. This process of organizing our findings led us to rearrange, break apart and define new categories and subcategories based on emerging themes we found across users.

Instruction and motivation are key elements to starting and maintaining an exercise routine that supplements a healthy lifestyle. There are a number of factors that deter people from being physical active or prevent people from maximizing their workouts:

• People have busy and dynamic schedules which makes it difficult plan physical activity.
• People who do not exercise regularly feel uncomfortable or self-conscious approaching new forms ofexercises.
• People are motivated to exercise by seeing tangible results.

After completing the affinity diagram, we designed 4 unique personas for people who have varying fitness levels and different motivations for using our fitness application -DroidTrainer. Walking through each scenarios helped us flesh out potential features and functionality.

We created hand drawn paper prototypes of our interface and tested it with users. Taking the findings from our interpretation sessions, we made revisions to our wireframes and then did another round of testing with a high fidelity prototype built in Axure. Site Map: View

STAR is a training management application that is used for planning, scheduling, tracking, and reporting space-flight training and mission operations at Johnson Space Center. STAR provides an integrated curriculum development and documentation, custom training plan, scheduling of personnel and facilities, training events feedback and other training resources to NASA astronauts, flight controllers and instuctors. As a summer internship, I worked on an independent study project to design a proof of concept for a mobile adaptation of the existing STAR web application to improve efficiency of information distribution and synchronous communication.

There were two main objectives in approaching this design challenge. The first was to create a lower footprint model of current web application and the second was to provide users with meaningful information in a manner that is readable and accessible on a small mobile device.

I interviewed lead STAR engineers using to discover users needs and goals, to understand how users would complete STAR related tasks ad to identify user expectation.I created three primary personas and scenarios based on the data collected from user interviews and by researching existing documentation

Due to the wide use of Blackberry phones, I had to design a mobile application with patterns of interaction that were familiar and specific to the device.

5 iterations of 43 wireframes

Fueled by the Joycewars of the late 80s, the comparison of the many different editions of James Joyce' s Ulysses continues to be a highly contested debate due to the multiple editions and typography variations. In order to address this challenge, my partner and I brainstormed and designed Ulysses Anquiro Variorum. It is a web interface that allows Joyce scholars to compare digital versions of the text in both plain text and high-resolution digital images of the book or manuscript's original pages. Contextual links are used to provide cross-references to images, videos and maps that relate to the text. The interface targets the scholarly community and allows users to read and contribute commentary to enrich their experience of Ulysses.

As a comparative model, we examined software designed for bible study, which, like Ulysses Anquiro, share the following similarities: books/chapters vs. episodes, multiple translations, commentary & interpretations, and annotations.

This is a wireframe of the proposed main interface. The design adopts a pop-up windows metaphor that allows users to view content in separate panes that can be minimized, resized and moved to suit a user’s personal preferences

A notable feature of the Ulysses Anquiro is that it provides users with the ability to synchronized text. The interface is designed to facilitate the comparative study of multiple editions by allowing users to simultaneously view the same passage.

The objective was to design an object, interface, system, or service that supports the idea of utilizing or consuming local resources rather than global resources, in a sustainable and environmentally efficient manner. We designed a system of online classified ads that facilitates cascading used Information Technology (IT) equipment from high computing-intensive sectors in higher education institutions to lower-end sectors and then to the local community. eXtend promotes decreased consumption of new equipment which will lead to a decrease in the generation of local e-waste.

My team competed as semi-finalist in the CHI2009 student design competition in Boston.

Paper: Download | Publicity: UM Record Update

"Stories for Hope" -Rwanda, is a documentation project that archives digital media of cultural storytelling to support the efforts to re-build a positive legacy of Rwanda for future generations. The project scope is to build a website using Drupal, an open source content management system, that will support and sustain growing content as the volume of contributed stories and multimedia increases over time. The "Stories for Hope" website will serve as a medium to close the inter-generational gap between the young and old by exposing the various life experiences within local communities and across different regions within Rwanda. Making this information accessible to the public will connect people locally and globally with the culture of Rwanda.

The task was to design a system that would allow people to browse digital books in a large library collection by creating new ways for users to search and access Library content ( HathiTrust ). We designed a system called HATHIresearcher. It is a social networking site that serves as a means for researchers to find and exchange ideas and resources, or as a collaboration tool for researchers in different physical locations. HATHIresearcher has an interface called HATHI viewer that is used to navigate HATHI resources within the HATHIresearcher site. It is used whenever a HATHI resource is searched for or a link to a Hathi resource is clicked from a research project source page.

Knetwit.com is a knowledge sharing website that allows students to search and download course notes online, using social networking tools to foster learning through collaboration. My group assessed the usability of Knetwit.com using a variety of evaluation methods to determine the goals of a system, to perform organizational analysis, to determine ease of learning of the systems, and to evaluate the success in accomplishing the user/organizational goals. Please contact me if you are interested in viewing our reports.

We created an interaction diagram to understand the site's organization and to show the relationships between pages.

By applying contextual inquiry research methods, the primary objective was to examine the organization's current information use and generate recommendations that would improve their current workflow. We gathered data about the patient assignment process by interviewing the staff at the School of Denstistry. Using the notes from our interview we created several models based on that data to understand currently methods of communcation and workflow. We created an affinity diagram to identify signs of breakdowns or inefficiencies in the process, then organized all our findings to determine which issues were most pressing for the organization.

"Two years ago your team analyzed the Dentistry Patient Assignment process. I'm pleased to let you know that we just released a completed revamped, fully electronic patient assignment process with the majority of your recommendations implemented. I thought you'd like to know that your work bore fruit, all your work did. There were organization, technical and other challenges as you noted in that report if you recall it." -RG

Report: Download

The Internet has developed a large repository of useful medical and health-related information and tools. Research has proven that anxiety is one of the main factors that prevents older people from using the Internet to find this information; but little has been done to ease these anxieties. The Helping OUT team will approach this problem from a combined perspective of public health and human-computer interaction, bringing together an ideal combination of unique strengths. We will interview and observe older computer users to learn where they encounter problems and frustration, and we will also work with teachers to discover what strategies are most effective in helping new learners. Our ultimate goal is to create a living online resource that details our process and findings, so that instructors, website developers and software developers can easily understand the common problems that older users of technologies face.