Thank you Internal Revenue Service…

…for reinvesting all my my money into Social Security, National Defense (who is attacking us again?) and Medicare/Medicade that I will most likely never benefit from when I need it later in life.

I  just finished my first pass at doing my taxes this year.  Thus, being a single & childless consultant, working in two states, as a graduate student receiving a stipend and tuition scholarships is not an ideal situation for tax purposes I discovered.  As the figure above shows, 2010 was not the best year for me in terms of my tax return (I have removed specific numbers since its none of your business).  Yes, I could have payed taxes as I go given that I’m a MISC-1099 consultant for 50% of my income; however, the fact that UB screwed me over in terms of its billing/payment cycles did not help, nor did the fact that Adecco decided to switch to a different company midyear and take out less taxes than required for my W-2.

In any event, paying taxes are lame (which is not the same as ‘not necessary’) and a better system should be devised or I should have become a tax attorney.  For example, I’m a human factors consultant, for which having a Ph.D. in the field significantly helps me to find work and succeed.  However, I’m not allowed to write off my educational expenses as a business expense (am i?), which would save me tons* of money (*if it was in coins).

So i’m abandoning my 2011 new year’s resolution to adopt a new one that is to avoid having to pay extra taxes in 2012 (e.g., do better at paying as I go, getting proper deductions taken out, and itemizing business expenses).  My old resolution was to give up alcohol; so thank you I.R.S., you have just knocked one more individual off the wagon.

Wireframes and Site Architecture

As one of the larger projects i’ve taken on in my freelance work, I expected the task of designing a product customization wizard for a company like Staples to be dominated by business minded persons focused only on their requirements.  I am pleased to say however, that after working for several months on designing a comprehensive suite of tools, the team was a pleasure to work with and was one of the most enjoyable projects i’ve had the opportunity to be a part of.  Everyone was open to out of the box ideas, and took the time to understand the usability considerations that need to go into designing a consumer facing application, especially given the complexity of this one.  It really made the project an enjoyable and just downright fun experience thanks to the people and process that was followed.

The project consisted of planning and designing a web-based application used by consumers or businesses to purchase personalized promotional products (you can see the live version here, but need to select a product and choose “customize” to get into the application).  I lead the information architecture, site design & wireframing efforts from the project’s early stages through the first couple rounds of usability testing and hand-off for initial developing.  It was a great experience to be able to inject usability and user experience considerations right from the start, which made my life a lot easier throughout the project.   Key tasks that I was responsible for during the project included the following:

• Competitor evaluation to determine best practices, common usability issues, and opportunities for differentiation
• Lead white board sessions to sketch out low fidelity wireframes with a cross-functional project team
• Directed the information architecture of the site and created a detailed site flow combining wireframes and interactions to ensure a positive user experience
• Worked with Staples’ usability/user experience team to plan and conduct usability testing on two rounds of site prototypes
• Designed click-through HTML prototype using Dreamweaver for use in usability testing

You can view a sample of the wireframes embedded within a site flow/interaction document using the plug-in below (requires flash):

Emotiv EPOC, gaming for the true couch potatoe

Last December I finally received my long awaited Emotiv EPOC EEG headset.  However, after trying it on initially and quickly trying the demo content that I downloaded off their website I have had no significant timeframe to test out the device. <FAIL>

I’ve heard good things about it’s capabilities from a fellow researcher who has one and has spent a significant amount of time looking at EEG and other measurements for evaluating user engagement.  My own goal is to use the device in order measure a users excitement and/or frustration levels as they interact with (theoretically) any interface.  For the freelance work I do, this will let me add a quantitative and scientifically founded argument to design recommendations that would be qualitatively based using more traditional HF methodologies.

My goal is to spend a week over the summer ramping up on the device, getting a baseline for myself (testing it with video games), and then run a pilot study with 2-3 people to see how hard the process would be to incorporate in a traditional usability test.

Evaluation of Bluetooth Laser Keyboard

Late to post online, during Fall of 2008 I worked on a group project for my Human-Computer Interaction course here at UB.  The assignment was to evaluate and recommend improvements for a HCI of our choice.  I suggested, and convinced my group to evaluate a Bluetooth Laser Keyboard (it projects a keyboard onto any flat surface) that I bought from ThinkGeek.com.  The project was conducted over the course of the semester and included:

• Modified GOMS-KLM analysis, adapted to estimate the time to type using a standard keyboard versus the laser keyboard
• User personas for different classes of users in order to generate use case scenarios for the laser keyboard
• Online questionnaire via SurveyMonkey.com to gather general keyboard use data for the above personas
• Development of Flash based prototypes to evaluate alternate designs for the laser keyboard to improve typing efficiency

I decided to post this to my portfolio because I was particularly happy with the experimental setup I designed to evaluate prototypes of our redesigned laser keyboard.  Our focus was on redesigning the layout of the keys that were projected in order to improve usefulness and usability of the device.  In order to evaluate our different proposed changes our experimental setup, diagrammed above, utilized an Adobe Flash created configurable keyboard (you can try them it below using your mouse) which users interacted with by typing on scaled paper versions of the keyboard layouts that we placed under a glass touchscreen panel.  This allowed us to essentially place the paper keyboard anywhere and configure it how we wished and then just put the touchscreen on top to allow for typing.

Our recommended designs significantly improved typing speed in an experiment we ran to evaluate our design versus the laser keyboard default layout (n=5, p<.05).

IE535 – FLASH Prototype

Redesigned Keyboard Layout

Cell Phone Menu Structure – Visio

This diagram was created to illustrate the menu process flow and available features for 3 different cellular phones being developed which would used shared software. You can view the implementation of these by looking at the wireframes which are also part of my portfolio.

Layout Digitization – AutoCAD

Hospital Layout

The above link is a drawing tha was created as an as-built version of a local New England area hospital. This PDF is one of two floors that were created based on existing blueprints that needed updating and digitization for future planning.

Facility Layout – AutoCAD

Facility Layout (PDF)

This drawing was produced as a new layout for the expansion of a Massachusetts based medical device manufacturer. The roughly 160K sq ft building was designed for end-to-end production flow efficiencies.  The layout was created to be a macro/micro view of the facility as well as equipment assests and product flows.

Information Graphic – BC Watch

The above information graphic was created as part of a project to develop a watch which assisted in the use of birth control pills to help prevent user error.  The information graphic is meant to illustrate how to change pill cartridges in the watch.

Information graphics or infographics are visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics are used anywhere where information needs to be explained quickly or simply, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education.

Flash Wireframes/Prototypes – Cellular Phone UI

I created these wireframes as part of my senior capstone design project for Northeastern University.  The wireframes were meant to be upgraded interfaces for 3 user profiles: The Grandma, The Dad and The 20-Something College student.  The motorola flash interface was created to mimic a popular phone at the time so that user testing sessions could be used to create baseline task completion times and usability ratings.

You can use the flash menus below as you would a normal cell phone basically.  The Motorola version however has limited functions to specific tasks that were required for the usability sessions.

Hand Drawn Wireframe – Usability Portal

This wireframe was created to illustrate a concept for a usability portal to be used as a central hub for UI/IA experts.  To show basic interactions post-it notes were used which showed how different widgets in the interface changed based on simulated interactions.  The blue numbers represent annotations that explained different aspects of the wireframe for users.