I’ve been making some changes to my website, and transferring project summaries from old, static html pages to my new WordPress-powered website. This is the first in a series of three or four posts covering projects I worked on before my current postdoc position.
Push to View, Motorola Labs, 2002
We identified a user need through field research: people want to be able to share aspects of an experience with others, while it is happening. A prototype was designed and built to allow people to share photos using mobile phones during a conversation, as opposed to the “store and forward” approach taken by mobile multimedia messaging (MMS) applications. The Push-To-View application, based on our initial prototype [ link, archived ], was rolled out to several mobile phone carriers. More information here: [ link, archived | design ]
Family and Friend Communication Study, Motorola Labs, 2001
We conducted a “rapid ethnography” field study to identify communication breakdowns between friends and family members who do not see each other on a daily basis. Our focus was on how people use different kinds of communication media to keep in touch. Findings of this research led to the initial prototype for the Push to View mobile phone application (above). [ technical report ]
TI StudyCards, Carnegie Mellon University, 1999
Capstone group project for the professional Master of HCI degree at Carnegie Mellon University, sponsored by Texas Instruments. Our goal was to find ways graphing calculators could be utilized in high school humanities classrooms. Based on contextual inquiry studies with teachers and students, we created “TI StudyCards”, which consisted of a flash card viewer for the calculator and software for the PC that enabled the creation of sets of flash cards for the calculators. StudyCards now come pre-installed on all TI graphing calculators, and can be downloaded from the TI website: [ link | report ].
