In this exercise we were tasked with redesigning the online registration process for the Registrar at Kent State University. The stated problem was that the site felt "clunky" and "difficult to navigate." The required process was to evaluate functionality of the site, determine the site's audience, and generate an appropriate design framework from this data. The deliverable products from this site were wireframes and flow diagrams for the proposed site.

This project utilized:

• heuristic evaluation
• generating design tenets
• persona generation
• storyboarding
• flow charting
• wireframing

Users of the JetPens.com website had reported difficulty finding appropriate items within a reasonable amount of effort. This usability test was to determine how well users could find a product, a family of products, and a group of product types.

My final report for the project can be found here, and a video explanation of the final report can be found here. Please take a look at the video for a more robust explanation of the project.

Using the online usability testing service Loop 11, this project utilized:

• Online Survey
• Usability Tasks

The purpose of this project was to generate a set of Knowledge Operating System (KOS) products for iGreetings (an online greeting card company). These KOS products would internally organize the thousands of digital items in archives for easy browsing and searching.

For the purposes of this proposal, examples of the KOS products for both both the individual visual assets and finished products are shown to illustrate how a complete KOS could function within the iGreetings intranet.

To look at the final report for this project, please click here.

This project utilized:

• Facets and Pick Lists
• Synonym Rings
• Taxonomic Notation

My colleague and I were interested in investigating some usability perceptions concerning voice-recognition, so, after some preliminary research, we developed our final research project on users' perception vs their expectations with Siri.

There is a direct correlation between users’ perceptions of a technology’s capabilities and their satisfaction with that technology. When the expectation outperforms the capabilities, users’ satisfaction suffers.

Ultimately we used these processes to determine why users' expectations were not being met and potential ways to bring those expectations in line with voice-recognition's actual capabilities.

Our personal interview highlight reel can be found here, and our final report can be found here. Please follow those links and watch our video and read the report for a better understanding of our process and results.

An additional point of interest from this research indicated that there is a strong regionalism in the level of Siri usage. We go into more detail about the emergence of this regionalism in our article in UXMatters. You can find that article here.

This project utilized:

• user diaries (a completed diary can be found here)
• online surveys
• personal interviews
• persona generation