Hello! I am a Human-Computer Interaction student at the University of Michigan School of Information. I am currently seeking a summer internship in the field of user experience design.
I can be reached via email: nacf at umich dot edu. Here is my resume.
Recent projects
NexText student workspace
Teammates: Derek Blancey, Amanda Kosater, Matt Scheinerman, Ari Parnes
My role: This was a team project, so most work was collaborative.
I lead the contextual inquiry process and the hi-fi prototype development.
Awards: 1st place Community Information Award, Honorable Mention for Best Overall Project Presentation at SI expoSItion poster session
Project website: NexText
The Challenge
Perry Samson, co-founder of the Weather Underground and a professor of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences at the University of Michigan, asked our team to develop an browser-based textbook interface.
Design Process
Our project began with user interviews to determine what kind of resources students are provided for their classes, and how they use those resources. Using the data we collected from our interviews, we created an affinity diagram in order to identify themes and patterns. Most notably, we found that the students we talked to tended to use their textbooks as a reference, and used lecture slides and their notes as primary resources. We also found that students are increasingly comfortable reading and taking notes on the computer. However, the ability to easily annotate course resources was highly desired – and when students could not figure out ways to do this, they would end up printing out resources and interacting with them on paper.
We then created personas and scenarios in order to help us develop a lo-fi prototype using Balsamiq Mockups. Our prototype consisted of a centralized, flexible workspace for interacting with courses resources – including textbooks, lecture slides, and notebooks – through tiled side-by-side panels. Other key ideas we came up with included support for dragging and dropping content directly from a resource into a notebook with autogenerated links back to the original source, a system for creating, sharing and managing annotations, and the ability to tag and easily navigate back to key concepts in a textbook.
The next step was to create a testable prototype. We considered using a rapid prototyping tool like Axure, but realized that because of certain features of our interface – in particular the notebook, annotations and drag and drop – it would make more sense to use HTML, CSS and jQuery.
Once we had the key elements of the interface working, we conducted user tests in order to gauge the usability of basic NexText interactions. We also asked for feedback on the concept as a whole. We found that users had some trouble getting started with the interface, and were not aware of the drag-and-drop functionality. However, in general they were very enthusiastic about the concept of interacting with all their course materials in once place, having the ability to annotate, and the integrated notebook.