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As Grockit became more popular, it became clear that it was time to begin charging for the service. Since the best user experience for students requires many students being online at once, we decided to keep Group Study free while charging for the other features.

My role on the project included:

• Designed and wrote copy for product matrix comparing packages to purchase.
• Worked with marketing to develop optional purchase flows to A/B test to determine what produced the highest conversions.
• Identified key areas to prompt for upgrade, and designed feature set around giving samples and appropriate callouts.

Example design-work:

• Flow Sketch
• Product Matrix
• Prompts
• Report Prompt

Grockit is primarily a way for students to study together online through a chat and a shared question-answering experience. However, as we added more features, such as performance analyses, customized question sets, tutoring, and solo sessions, it became increasingly difficult for users to find what to do and to learn of new features. As business goals and feature-sets changed, we decided a redesign of the product homepage was necessary.

My role on the project included:

• Developed initial concept for redesign based on current and planned features and user feedback.
• Created iconography and visual design of appropriate pages to maintain consistency across the site.

Example design-work:

• Original Design
• Study Dashboard
• Group Study
• Solo

In order to showcase the power and flexibility of the database behind Freebase.com, we designed an exploratory tool that simplified the query-building process. The visualization builder defaults to a table-view of topics which can be configured, filtered, added to, exported, and saved. Users can also choose to view the data in a gallery, timeline or map.

My role on the project included:

• Developed initial concept for a simple tabular query builder.
• Created several wireframe iterations and worked with team to determine use cases and hone project goals.
• Directed project definition when feature requests began growing too large.
• Refined design based on usability tests, engineering constraints, and project redefinition.

Example design-work:

• 1st Wireframe
• More Features
• Final Design
• Sorting
• Visualizations

Freebase.com users want to be able to share information about themselves and find other users with similar interests. This information can be explicit, such as a hometown or birth date, or can be implied through the activities the user engages in on the site. The user profile was designed to show both kinds of information through a chronological reporting of activity, listings of saved views and bases, and a link to a person topic about them.

My role on the project included:

• Responsible for information design and page layout, including determining fidelity for different pieces of information.
• Write specification for how and what information should be reported as user activity.
• Design contextual help feature for connecting the user profile to a community-editable person topic.

Example design-work:

• Your Profile
• Person Topic
• User Activity

One of the primary design objectives of Freebase.com was to allow users to input data about anything and everything. In order to benefit from the robust graph database back-end, it was important to ensure data was added in the correct format, whether it be a date, text, integer or a link to an item previously entered into the system. However, from a form design perspective, the fields needed to allow the user to input information how they want to, instead of how the database required them to.

My role on the project included:

• Designed flexible inputs that accepted a variety of formats and gave immediate feedback to ensure the system's interpretation of the input was as intended.
• Tested and iterated interaction details for item selection when the input field offered options.
• Provided flow-diagrams, mock-ups and specifications to engineering, while also working closely with the developer to implement and refine details.

Example design-work:

• Auto-suggest
• Info Pane
• Interaction
• Date Input
• Select List

Initially, Freebase.com was designed with both a central discussion area and a help center for documentation. After some use, we found that this separation between staff-generated content and user discussions was less than ideal for both the users looking for help and the staff members trying to provide it. The central discussion area was removed and its content was simplified and integrated into the help center. This provided a single place for users to find answers and encouraged community by showcasing recent discussions and inviting participation.

My role on the project included:

• Worked closely with community manager to determine requirements.
• Designed data model to allow documentation manager to organize content.
• Created page layout and new discussion feature to clarify page function and direct user towards helpful content.

Example design-work:

• Discussions
• Help Center
• Final Design

Interwoven LiveSite, a component-based content management solution, is marketed and sold with partially built websites to allow for easy demonstration and deployment. The Sales Solution website is designed to provide sales teams with easy access to product-related information, such as news, events, sales programs, customer information, and product collateral. The design and taxonomy is geared towards mid-size technology firms, but the basic design is meant to be flexible enough for many customers to modify so the website fits their specific needs.

My role on the project included:

• Conducted brief interviews with account executives and sales teams to determine information needs and common vocabulary.
• Designed faceted taxonomy to allow for meaningful content contribution and dynamic display of information.
• Developed visual design and layout.
• Created modified faceted browsing interaction to facilitate document location.
• Worked closely with development team to design components and create site templates.

Governmental programs are notoriously complicated, for the public as well as staff. At Women, Infants and Children (WIC), staff are often faced with complex situations and have to make quick decisions when helping clients — all while making sure they are following procedure and correctly interpreting constantly changing governmental regulations. With the new program guide, managers are able to communicate procedural changes to all staff, and staff can quickly and easily find answers to their questions without having to search through emails or binders.

My role on the project included:

• Conducting focus groups and observation sessions of users in their work setting.
• Developing and testing initial information design using paper prototype.
• Coding and scripting website for easy update using Macromedia Contribute combined with Dreamweaver templates.
• Working closely with client throughout entire process, from needs assessment to choosing the final visual design of website.

For our final Masters Project, Leah Zagreus and I designed an exploratory data analysis tool that enables researchers at the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) to investigate data collected by the organization's Occupant Satisfaction Survey. The tool displays visual representations of the survey data in a crosstab format. The user sets up the survey questions to be compared, and the resulting charts allow responses to questions between and within surveys to be evaluated. The ArchMiner interface was built using Java Swing components with charts generated by Visual Mining NetCharts Server, a commercial charting package. The backend is a multithreaded application written in Java using the JDBC to pull data from a Microsoft SQL Server database.

My role on the project included:

• Keeping group on schedule, managing group and client expectations and organizing project documentation.
• Scheduling and participating in needs assessment interviews and user tests of four iterations of the interface design.
• Working with design group to develop two paper and three interactive prototypes of the interface.
• Coded aspects of the interface using Java Swing components.