Research & Development
SynchStep for the iPhone/iPod Touch - 2008A port of SynchStep (previously known as PersonalSoundtrack) to the iPhone.
SynchStep plays songs from your iPhone library that match your pace. Every step you take lands in-time with a drum hit, a bass pluck, a piano chord.
It has been downloaded and installed ~280,000 times in approximately 2.5 months.
BPM Analyzer - 2008An open-source, cross-platform library to determine the tempo of any song.
I've been working with Dr. Werner Van Belle on this project, porting his robust linux algorithm into a stand-alone library that uses a straight-forward API and is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. At present the library is functional and can be compiled on all three platforms.
The algorithm porting is not yet complete, so it will fail to find the temp about 20% of the time, but it will note which tracks it was unable to analyze.
PublicSoundtrack - 2007Don't be afraid to 'waste' some time. This techno-social experiment picks at the role of efficiency in our lives, and opens it to public discussion. Involuntary, transient performances between strangers allow us to question our need to "get things done."
PublicSoundtrack uses bluetooth-enabled, pocket-sized mp3-players that interrupt your music when other mp3-players are in the area. Nearby listeners are forced to tap a collective beat in order to resume the music that is then synchronized to the group's beat; however, none of the listeners hears what others are listening to - each group member hears a song from their personal library, synched up to the group tempo. The result is semi-voluntary, transient social performances.
PersonalSoundtrack - 2006PersonalSoundtrack plays songs from your music library that match your pace. Every step you take lands in-time with a drum hit, a bass pluck, a piano chord.
This device is not concerned with an optimal workout or improving the health of america. It is intended to de-optimize us, and do away with the notion of an "optimal" walk or run. There is no program to follow, or pre-determined track; you begin walking and the computer follows you, adapting to you and your walking style without protest. It supports meandering, wasting time, and loitering.
Getting on the Same Page - 2004For my undergraduate honors thesis, I developed the History Slider, a tool that allows users to quickly scrub through and review events from previous interactions. When users meet after prologned absences, they can use this tool to "get on the same page." User experiments showed subjects performed 40% better individually and 22% better collectively with this tool, with p-values less than .028.
Professional
POKE New York - Dailymotion - Launching late 2008Re-branding, re-designing, and re-ux'ing Dailymotion.com, also known as the YouTube of Europe.
I am the UX Lead for this project.
POKE New York - Teroforma - 2008Online tableware company website. I was UX Lead for this project, which is essentially an online application.
POKE New York - KY Keep Life Sexy - 2007Assisted with UX Design.
It just didn’t seem right for a lubricant brand like K-Y to give the definition of “sexy”, so we asked the world to tell K-Y what sexy is. The latest site KeepLifeSexy.com was launched by POKE New York in mid January. It allows people to complete the phrase, Sexy is ___________ and add to the growing collection of sexy outbursts. All the phrases can be sorted by age and gender, giving a view of the ever changing pulse of sexiness.
POKE New York - BBC Love Earth - 2007Assisted with UX design.
Elephants, whales, and polar bears aren’t twittering their whereabouts – yet. But fear not, they’ve been given the next best thing: GPS tracking tags. And now you can track them online, thanks to the new loveearth.com site, made with tender loving care by POKE and the BBC Worldwide teams. The site is currently live in Europe, and will roll out early next year in the U.S.
In a nutshell, visitors can follow the migratory lives of some of the species featured in BBC Worldwide and Greenlight Media’s film, “Earth”. Drop by the site to see where Nuka the polar bear is hanging out on Google Maps, or follow a humpback whale as it makes its 4,000-mile trip from the equator to the Antarctic.
Of course, there’s more to the site than tracking.
To connect you even more with the experience, zoologists and environmentalists are documenting their travels and studies via blogs. This gives you the ability to comment and ask questions about their work and the animals they’re involved with.
You can also drop by the Reading Room for Animal Facts, Essays, and Quick Guides; visit the Studio for videos and photo galleries; or learn how to give back to mother earth and help save some endangered species. There’s a bucket load more—check it out.
Steelcase Internal R&D Site - Private - 2007Interaction design of an internal site for Steelcase that facilitates communication and collaboration between disparate research groups. I'm currently developing designs and interfaces that allow opportunistic browsing of projects and artifacts at steelcase, allowing researchers to find related information and review past research from outside their home department.
Elearning - 2001-2006I developed a custom E-Learning system under the direction of Dr. David Kirsh. Currently, it's in use at UC San Diego and UC Irvine.
This project is the result of a 5-year endeavor between Dr. David Kirsh and myself. It consumed most of my professional time during my undergraduate career. I was responsible for the entire project under the supervision of Dr. Kirsh, including front-end, back-end, user experience, and user studies.
The E-Learning site is a massive system that was engineering from scratch to scale to house hundreds of classes. Each design decision was carefully considered to allow for easy maintenance of both back and front-end. The plug-in architecture works much like an Interface in code: custom plug-ins can be created, but must adhere to the structure and definitions put forth by the plug-in architecture. This also aids maintenence because many core functions of the site are based on this plug-in architecture, meaning that once you understand how one plug-in works you understand how all other plug-ins work. This improves hand-offs between developers as well as the general mental stability of those developers.
It humanize E-Learning while improving workflow and group collaboration both in and out of class. It offers contextualized interfaces that highlight resources only when they are most useful. Novel features: student-student grading, intelligent reminders, WYSIWYG scheduler, plug-in architecture.
This site is designed for recurring use. That is, professors may spend a half-hour or hour setting up their course initially, but all subsequent versions of that class can be updated in minutes. In one-click, old students and their work can be archived, and new students can be imported and have accounts and passwords created automatically.
During the final years of dedicated work, I was in charge of several subordinates who handled code maintenance and upgrade tasks. It's current graphic design was completed in 2003, and thus requires an update to modernize it; however, the minimalism and coherency of the site overshadow its slightly dated appearance.
Western Financial Planning - Private - 2001-2002WFPC required a site for the management of financial planning for both clients and agents. I designed the back-end and front-end for this site, and was part of the project from inception to deployment. The challenge with this project was to make a large amount of complex data attractive and usable in a web-interface. This design avoids both information overload and the "pretty-but-non-functional" trap.
UCSD Pediatrics WebVote - Private (2000)My first web development gig, I created an application for departmental voting Developed Pediatrics main site back-end/front-end, including automatic data imports from the UCSD Sybase database. Managed subordinate for expanding database.
I was asked to create an extremely minimal interface because many of the users were computer illiterate. This site is still being used today.