Welcome!
I am a recent graduate of the Master of Science in Information Management program within the Information School at the University of Washington. Both my professional experience and academic background in the management of people, information, and technology have prepared me to design and evaluate customer-facing products and applications. Here is my resume.
Portfolio
For more examples of my work, please go to my portfolio page.Design
“Future Mobile Devices for Physical Therapists”
For this project, we designed a futuristic wrist-worn mobile device for physical therapists at the University of Washington Medical Center. Our team performed field contextual inquiries with key stakeholders. We used a rapid prototyping process to create several iterations of our initial design interface, which were evaluated by stakeholders. We conceived of a working HTML prototype of the menu system and sub-menu directories.
Skills Learned: Contextual inquiry, paper prototyping, structured brainstorming, field testing. Extensive project management was required to execute this project in several phases.
Results: This project placed first among a panel of invited Nokia, Microsoft, and Intel researchers.
Usability
“Heuristic Evaluation of Treo 750 Smartphone”
We reviewed the Palm Treo 750 smartphone, running the Windows Mobile 5 OS. A total of 28 separate deficiencies in two evaluations were discovered using Nielsen’s usability heuristics and severity/fixability
ratings. Three critical recommendations, all related to the interface, were suggested as high priority items: make consistent menu scrolling features throughout menus, add a back button instead of relying on a “catch-all” OK button, and add a “change button” icon to assure that the user isn’t guessing about what buttons mean. The largest set of heuristics problems found related to user recall and memorization of menu choices and external phone buttons.
Skills Learned: Heuristic evaluation, interaction design.
Results: Improvements from this evaluation were estimated to increase speed and accuracy by 25% for the end user, resulting in a large performance gain.
Input and Interaction
“Zero Button Mouse Technique”
For this project, our team created a zero-button mouse interaction technique called "Orthogonal Reverse 
Cross (ORC)." Inspiration for the project came from original work by Wobbrock and Gajos (Big 3MB PDF) on goal-crossing with trackball and from www.dontclick.it. Ten design sketches were ideated and a lo-fi prototype written in C# was tested on volunteers in a controlled setting.
Skills Learned: Usability testing, interaction design, interaction sequences, paper prototype.
Results: Based on the no-click design, users scored an error rate of less than 10% for target aquisition, given distractors from 4 directions. Click here for executable demo.
User Research
“Educational Interfaces for Native American Students” Research work centers on designing novel educational interfaces with multimodal functionality for Native American students studying environmental science. Extensive interviews were conducted with teachers from custom-designed study instruments. A 
pilot survey on graphical paper was devised and used to inform semi-structured interview schedules.
This project includes development of functional specifications for future development and interative design. Research from this project is the first of its kind in the world and should inform educational researchers of indigenous populations who are creating a workable tool for environmental science fieldwork.
Skills Learned: User-centered design (UCD) and prototyping of UIs, multimodal interaction and interface design, cognitive modeling, research methods, statistical analysis.
Results: Ten interviews and pilots were conducted. An detailed survey on digital paper and semi-structured interview instrument were designed and piloted. Generalized results from interview data will be used in functional specifications.
Virtual Representation of Me!
A Good Quote: "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." - Bertrand Russell
Contact Me
My email address is if you want to contact me. I am usually available via email on a regular basis.