My Design Process

Observe. My degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and personal interests make me both qualified and intrigued to talk with users. I conduct remote and personal interviews to understand how people already tackle common problems in work and life. I love to sit down with people and see how they work. At this point, I'm seeking less to validate my own assumptions and more to develop my knowledge of a domain, processes, preferences, and even problems and opportunities.

Design. Taking what I learned from observing people, I define how a solution might help. I develop use cases and mockups to visualize the solution. First come L1 mockups: sketches, wireframes, and other pictures that help to answer questions about how a product might behave when a person interacts with it. L2 mockups, meanwhile, are higher fidelity and come as close to "pixel-perfect" as I can make them.

Develop. The best part of designing user interfaces is building them. While the back-end stuff can really interest me as an engineer, I find myself more interested in ensuring that the front-end interface meets the user requirements set forth earlier in the process. I'm really comfortable with HTML, CSS, Javascript, and other front-end tech, and try to merge great aesthetics with functionality.

In the case of Concerto, I worked with friends to design and build a new type of community-based public advertising platform. I studied event promoters and identified their needs, turning my observations into a set of personas. I led the development of the user interface, which has helped make Concerto a popular open source project with users around the world.

Flagship Tasks is a simple task manager. I represented the user directly - in other words, this was an instance of "eating one's own dog food." The front-facing interface, implemented in Rails 3, CSS, and jQuery, materialized quickly and made the product accessible and fun to use. This was a great opportunity to carry a smaller project from concept to execution quickly.

In order to create RPI TV's new website, I conducted interviews with students both inside and outside of the club and other members of the campus community. I designed the interface for the public site and the back-end management platform. Designed with web-streaming video in mind, the site was launched to rave reviews and receives visits from thousands of people each month.