The standard form that Georgetown uses for direct deposit asks for every piece of information needed to initiate the service for an employee: name, bank name, account number, routing number. Most students have absolutely no problem supplying this information on their own. The problem arises when they submit the form — you see, Georgetown’s payroll department requires that applicants attach a voided check along with the form, because they don’t trust people to write down the correct bank info themselves.  This itself wouldn’t be a problem, if student employees actually had checks.  Apparently, a staggering number of banks do not provide paper checks with their checking accounts, preferring instead to simply issue a debit card and call it a day. Checks cost extra, so students typically forego them (honestly, who needs paper checks anymore, anyway?).  The payroll department had its requirements, but I really wanted to help the students get their direct deposit: when you have 180 of them working for you, it’s kind of a pain to deal with paper paychecks every two weeks.

My solution, basically, was to give students a way of printing a check to submit with the direct deposit form. I added a second page to the original PDF direct deposit form with the image of a blank check on it. Using a simple bit of JavaScript, the second page pulls the student’s name and bank info from the first page and superimposes it into the image. A MICR-style font is embedded in the PDF so the bank info displays properly and includes the appropriate symbols for account and routing numbers.  After filling in the form and printing it out, students can simply cut out the check from the second page and attach it to the form. Works like a charm.  Ah, the things we do for bureaucracy…

Try it out!  Download the form here and open it with Adobe Acrobat Reader (you actually do have to use Acrobat Reader specifically for this — other PDF readers don’t support the JavaScript I used to generate the image).

This mobile app is intended 1) to allow students to see how long they’ll have to wait for one of the loop shuttles, thus taking some of the load off of the individual escort vans, and 2) to allow ride requests to be made instantly, securely, and with a minimum of human error (no more unintelligible pickup locations).

This interface would be more or less the same on an iphone or an android-based device; small adjustments would be made for the droid’s typical hard-coded menu buttons.  The native app carries the advantages of being location aware and having access to the phone’s number (collected automatically to provide the dispatchers with a number to call to communicate ride information if necessary), but a web app would be essentially identical.

If you have Balsamiq Mockups installed on your system, you can download the BMML files here and click through an interactive version.

When I was learning various techniques for building a complete picture of a network, I realized I already knew most of the standard ones (surveys, journaling, content analysis of emails, etc).  So rather than rehashing all that for my final project, I decided to experiment with a more automated method of data collection so I could focus on the graph metrics.  I used a pre-existing corpus to which I’d already had substantial exposure: J.R.R.  Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Using a pre-defined list of characters great and small, plus any aliases they used in the books, I searched the text for the phrase “name1 and name2,” hypothesizing that characters with connections would appear in that phrase at least somewhere in the trilogy.  The number of hits on each phrase provided the edge width.  It was, if I do say so, surprisingly accurate.

Once I had the list of connections, I imported them into NodeXL to calculate metrics and generate a visualization.  The final graph yielded results both expected and surprising, which are detailed in this presentation I gave on it:

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 took over a week of full-time work.  This program does it in less than a second.

I wrote it in C++. The program reads in a CSV of employee availabilities (shifts are hard-coded, for now) and outputs 1) a schedule with as many desks filled as possible, and 2) a summary of each employee’s availability after scheduling.

Download the source here.

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 under review for publication (so I shouldn’t post it here), but if you’re interested in reading a draft, contact me and I’ll send you one.

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 your exclusive perusal so you can get an idea of how I work.

• Bing Travel
• Windows Media Player
• eRepublik
• USAA, GoDaddy

Feedback is always welcome!  If you have a particular type of system or software you’d like to see reviewed here, feel free to contact me and let me know.

The first step was to sit down with a few officers and listen to them describe common reports and things they didn’t like about the MS Access system.  Once I had a rough idea, I started sketching some screens on graph paper while they looked on.  This was the first iteration of the simple system:

After some interactive testing, we eventually decided that the first design was too “screen-happy.” Rather than presenting a “main menu” after an officer logged in, we decided that it would be more efficient to immediately display the list of recent reports and include a link somewhere to add a new report (I say link instead of button because at this point, we had decided that the application would be primarily web-based to facilitate greater accessibility). I did a quick sketch of the home screen after login in Balsamiq:

From here, it was relatively easy to implement a PHP-based solution.  The final design uses a darker blue/gray/green color scheme, which is easier on the officers’ eyes.  Editable text fields are highlighted by thick green rectangles upon mouseover. The report list includes a CSS style to highlight an entire record based on the cursor’s vertical position.  On the writing portion of the interface, the “submit report” button is huge and unmistakeable (a frequent complaint about the MS Access system).  A demo of the final interface can be seen here (lacks some functionality).