I led a comprehensive contextual inquiry process to understand Detroit’s existing food system, interviewing approximately 34 stakeholders and conducting observations at local grocery stores, farmer’s markets, and a food delivery service. Our team discovered that low consumer demand for fresh local produce was the greatest obstacle to increasing consumption of Michigan grown fruits and vegetables and that the ideal location for an intervention was the local grocery store. Through storyboards and sketches we designed a Flash prototype for MIFresh, a shopping intervention system consisting of a wall-mounted large display and multiple kiosk terminals. The public display provides local food awareness, education and important instructions to promote customer interaction with the individual kiosks. The kiosks promote the purchase of local produce by utilizing familiar shopping features such as coupons and rewards programs. We tested a hi-fi prototype of the system with 5 grocery shoppers in Detroit and received positive feedback from all participants. For more information on the project please visit our website and view the poster we presented at CHI.

Young adults with chronic kidney disease struggle with anger, depression and feelings of isolation coping with an illness that is most common among the elderly. The National Kidney Foundation of Michigan (NKFM) has a successful peer mentoring program to help young adults and reached out to researchers at the University of Michigan School of Information to expand this program into an online support community. To kick-off the project I led an IDEO-style deep dive brainstorming session with peer mentors, NKFM administrators, and the research team. From this session I created a site concept document with site goals and characteristics, personas & scenarios, information architecture, and wireframes. With feedback from this document I significantly scaled back the sites’ features developing a final set of mockups as well as the site’s community guidelines and management plan. The site was built in Drupal by myself and 3 programmers using a modified Agile development process.

The Animation Station is a portable, easy-to-use workstation that allows people create short stop-motion animations. The original creators of the station approached our industrial design class for help designing the next iteration of the workstation. We began by using the station ourselves and documenting various usability problems. From information gathered from stakeholders on the project we focused on making our design kid-friendly, durable, and easy to transport. I drew sketches, created sketch models, and collaborated on a full-scale cardboard model of our team’s design. As the team moved towards building a working prototype I focused on creating the input device for the station. In previous iterations the users controlled the custom stop-animation software using a mouse. During testing we found the mouse to be problematic for many reasons, in particular, it took the users attention away from the animation space to the software interface. After many proposals the group decided on a simple button interface. I used a laser cutter to create the buttons and box from acrylic. Force sensing resistors below the buttons feed input to an Arduino board which communicates with the software over the serial port and also activates LED lights for visual feedback on button presses.

For over 3 years Kaiser Permanente's Care Management Institute has worked with user interface consultancy Aaron Marcus and Associates (AM+A) to redesign the Clinical Library so that it better fits the needs and workflow of time pressed clinicians. As the internal project manager I gave AM+A feedback on their designs and facilitated discussions of the designs with physician stakeholders from Kaiser’s 6 regions. While AM+A worked on UI elements of the redesign I focused on the information architecture of the site. I analyzed search statistics, WebTrends and, using an application built by the internal IT department, had each region sort all the documents in their collection. Using the sort data I completed a comprehensive content analysis, testing the proposed faceted navigation for the site. For user testing I defined the characteristics of users to be tested and number that needed to be tested, scheduled participants, wrote user test questions and reviewed final user testing script and mockups.

The Alumni Services of the Ross School of Business asked our Service Innovation Management team to design an IT-mediated service that would keep alumni connected to the school. During the empathic research phase I interviewed business school alumni, observed a local alumni event and, based on this data, created alumni personas. We created a Customer Journey Map plotting out the key moments for alumni and the social networks and IT systems alumni utilized in fulfilling their academic, social, and professional goals. Through the journey map we realized that our final solution must engage business students before they became alumni. In interviews and within our own group (made up of soon to be graduating business students) mentoring emerged as an important unfulfilled need. We devised a service, detailed in a Service Blueprint and a Storyboard, allowing current students to request mentoring from up to 3 alumni per year. By restricting requests and allowing mentors to monitor requests, the system will be able to attract and retain high quality mentors. All students using the service would commit to becoming a mentor after graduation, thus ensuring an ongoing supply of mentors.

Believing that his software had several usability issues, the project coordinator for Syntax2D asked our team to conduct a full usability analysis of the application. First the team collaborated on a generalized transition network that documented each screen of the systems’ major task flows. For user research we interviewed 7 space syntax researchers at the university and surveyed 55 space syntax from across the globe. For the competitive evaluation I conducted a thorough literature review while other team members researched a competing product, DepthMap. Each team member evaluated Syntax 2D using Jakob Nielsen's usability heuristics. We conducted usability testing with 4 space syntax researchers, asking participants to talk aloud while completing two tasks. We also used Camtesia to record audio and screen capture. Usability problems with the software were so severe that only one participant was able to complete the user testing tasks without assistance.

Our interdisciplinary team received a grant to build a prototype that would allow medical professionals to publish, comment on and classify authentic clinical cases. I completed a competitive analysis of existing online case repositories and online health communities and helped develop survey questions. Based on findings from the competitive analysis and semi-structured interviews with physicians I created wireframes in Omnigraffle. These wireframes became the template for the prototype built in XWiki.