Author Archive
Effective Solutions: Direct Deposit Form
This should be filed under “general problem solving,” but I’m putting it in the usability category because it deals with a workflow issue. When I managed student employees, one of the biggest problems I had was getting them successfully enrolled in direct deposit. Now, being that we had a separate payroll department that handled all...
Mobile Interface: SafeRides
At Georgetown, the Department of Public Safety provides free escort van rides to students traveling to and from campus at night (known as “SafeRides”), as well as three shuttle loops which pick up from the main gates every 15 minutes or so. Since students never know for sure when one of the shuttles is due...
Prototype Scheduler GUI
In an effort to make my scheduler program a bit more usable (in its present form, it’s anything but — command line only, lots of restrictions on input file types), I decided to design a graphical interface for it. This is the final result. As I worked on it, I had the current student employee...
Social Network Analysis
Amongst my weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, and social network analysis. Applied properly, SNA is a great technique for gathering user data for later use in user-centered design. It can allow you to understand what your user segments are, how they’re connected, and, if you make some unfounded-but-logical assumptions, what their goals...
Code Sample
I’m not primarily a programmer, but I can code (and when I get into The Zone, I love it). At one of my previous jobs, I needed a program to produce a schedule for about 170 employees based on their availability and how many desks we needed filled on any given shift. By hand, this...
Thesis: Second Life TPVs (forthcoming)
After much toil, I finally finished my thesis, User-Centered Design in Virtual World Interfaces: A Human Factors Perspective on Third-Party Second Life Viewers at the end of April and was awarded distinction after my defense. As promised, I will soon be sharing the results with the SL community. At the moment, the thesis is currently...
Sample Usability Evaluations
Over the past few years, I’ve been asked to do in-depth usability evaluations of various systems — web sites, desktop software, mobile apps. In fact, usability standards are one of the key points that my recent academic studies have touched on. The following are sample evaluations. As such, they were unsolicited and appear below for...
UI Project: Simple Report-Writing System
I work in a campus police department. For years, officers have written crime reports on Microsoft Access, which, while okay, isn’t particularly suited to the task. It can only be used on one computer at a time and is needlessly complicated for the straightforward information typically collected in a report. I was asked to come...
