Class & Team

Basic Interaction Design, Professor John Zimmerman, 3-person team

Project Description

Our project goal was to help young couples stay emotionally connected. We have chosen the audience to be the newly formed families with no children. For the purpose of identifying the needs of young families and identifying the opportunity areas, we conducted several interviews with young families. We used directed storytelling to identify the needs and discover the design opportunities. After synthesizing our user data, we created several concepts and created storyboards to find out the actual needs of the families. Then, we validated our concepts with families and created our final design.

Our final design is a ring that provides an intimate interface for couples to notify each other about their emotional status throughout the day and give each other emotional comfort and support when they need.

Watch video sketch
See presentation
Read process book

Class & Team

Basic Interaction Design, Professor John Zimmerman, 3-person team

Project Description

The goal for this project was to explore the issues and design challenges around transactional web sites that drive a benefit through some aspect of personalization. We chose to create an online bill payment experience. The methods used to create the web site mockup; directed storytelling, competitive evaluation, bricks and mortar observation, modeling, mood board, persona and scenario creation.

See presentation
Launch website

Class & Team

Designing for Service, Professor Shelley Evenson, 5-person team

Project Description

Our challenge in this mini class was to design services for Young Professionals (YPs) in Pittsburgh, with the ultimate goal to engage (and help retain) them in Pittsburgh. For this purpose we worked with a local institution the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh to retain or strengthen their institutional credibility and explore new ways to bring the outside-in.

Our team conducted field studies visiting 6 libraries, did user research (online survey and interviews), persona creation, stakeholder modeling, touchpoint model, and service blueprint. After the research step, we synthesized our findings and developed concepts in 3 categories virtual, inside and outside. After concept validation with YPs and cost-benefit analysis we finalized our concepts and presented our final recommendations for the libraries to the Carnegie Libraries Management and CEOs for Cities representative. Please see the presentation for the final recommendations.

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Class & Team

HCI Methods, Professor Bonnie John and Jennifer Mankoff, 4-person tea

Project Description

For this class, we built a prototype for an apartment hunting web site, MethodsHouse.com. The goal of MethodsHouse.com is to put everything apartment hunters could want to know about a listing in a single Web page. Without leaving the site, a user can quickly and easily evaluate the apartment, the renter, the neighborhood, accessibility to public transportation, and more. Our design is firmly grounded in usability principles and was guided by human-computer interaction methods.

Launch website