Portfolio

A BBC sponsored project looking at overcoming memory and attention barriers in interactive television (iTV) access. How can we make the existing BBC interactive services, with all of its complexity and capability available to an audience who may have been excluded in the past? While prior work has outlined guidelines and best practice for design, no work has evaluated and improved navigation in an existing system. Through a usability study, this research identifies and explores the inadequacies influencing day to day interaction with the current BBC services. From my findings of a heuristic evaluation and user study, I offer improvements through conceptual designs and a prototype interface to exemplify how the BBC iTV service can accommodate the needs of the cognitively impaired user. My research is available, with points of interests including P.17 (Heuristic Evaluation), P.32 (User Study) and P.39 (Design Solutions).

This work was awarded the Outstanding Project 2008/09 by the Computing Department at Lancaster University.

Skills - Heuristic Evaluation, User Study, Design

Design is a lot like a jigsaw puzzle, if you had a pair of scissors you could easily make any piece fit, but in the end, the final solution would be unsatisfactory. In my case I never produce great design concepts straight away. Designing is an iterative process consistently building on smaller ideas and sometimes even merging ideas together that gets you to the end product. That is why I find sketching so important; it is an ideal process for brainstorming and conceptual development. In this work, my brief was to look at how mobile technology could improve the museum visitor experience. It had particular emphasis on improving learning, and visitor orientation.

The output of this work can be seen in this presentation I gave to Imagination Lancaster. A selection of the final designs can also be found below;.

Since its launch 6 years ago Facebook has exploded in popularity with more than 350 million active users worldwide. Its success is unprecedented, in the period of one month the Facebook community will upload 2.5 billion photographs, 5 million videos and arrange 3.5 million events, with this figure growing month by month. As typical forms of usability fail in addressing the success and popularity of the social network site, it is plausible that the appeal of Facebook is directly connected to user experience.

The aim of this research was to uncover these user experiences within the Facebook site and understand the emotions instigating user interactions, with goal of designing a 3rd party application that encompasses these values.

Sketches of the proposed applications, can be found below;

Skills - Diary Study, Comparison Analysis, Concept Formulation, Design

This project looked at exploring the design/idea of Twitter for Interactive Television. The design was required to be simplistic and intuitive, while still having the full functionality users would expect of the web interface. Although, the size of a television screen is much larger than that of a computer, the elements are required to be larger, due to the distantance between the user and TV. As the screen real-estate was limited, I could not have the less important functions cluttering the user interface, which would have increased the complexity of the system. This was just one issue I faced in the design of this application. By focusing attention on the users, I was able to make successful design tradeoffs, which led to the following designs below;

Skills - Interviews, Design Research, Design

Match is a multi-touch bar room display, in which a group of users actively co-operate to solve interactive games, in which their success directly influences the prices of alcoholic beverages for everyone within the bar environment (i.e. Happy Hour prices). In this work, I was looking at ways of bringing members of the community together, a sort of social cohesion through using technology. In the end, the design of the Match interface never got completed (it was a conceptual project). Although design tools such as personas, scenarios and a hierarchical task analysis were utilised, examples of which can be found in this corresponding document.

Skills - Personas, Scenarios, Hierarchical Task Analysis, Design