Design and Develop a Social Network

Dates. 01/2010—04/2010
Course. Advanced Project & Social Computing Design
Collaborators. Me + 3 talented peers
Project URL. suitup.mikeharmala.com/integrated
Course URL. kerrykao.com/si694
Summary. Suit Up is a new social network that attempts to create a practical and enjoyable social space centered around fashion/clothing items. With an account, users can explore items, archive items, share items, follow other people and receive recommendations on what to wear. Suit Up provides many important social objects, and aims to be appealing to people with varying degrees of interest in their clothing. We updated our project website and presented our progress to the class at each milestone throughout the semester. We have done the following:

• Interviewed (6) & surveyed (over 70) potential users in order to understand their behaviors, feelings, frustrations and experiences with clothing, online and offline.
• Brainstormed, sketched and designed a lo-fidelity prototype of the Suit Up interface.
• Evaluated the prototype and tested paper prototypes with users in order to improve our original design.
• Created and evaluated a low-fidelity prototype of our system.
• Conceptualized the technical structure and interactions between the database, interface elements, PHP and recommender computations.
• Brainstormed ways to sustain users over time, and ways to sustain business/financing over time.
• Developed a functional version of the social network using MySQL, HTML/CSS/JQuery, and PHP.

Responsibilities. I wrote and presented a several of the milestone reports to the class. I produced sketches for many of the main interface pages, such as the profile page and item page, then refined these into lo-fidelity mockups. Then I helped ensure our site interacted with the recommender system. Using PHP, HTML and CSS, I helped code the pages so they worked dynamically with the database. Finally, I gave the final presentation walkthrough of the application.

Result. In just about a month and a half, we developed a functional version of the system, with most of the features incorporated into the design. Many of our classmates seemed quite impressed with the result, and even mentioned they wanted to use it for their own personal benefit. Maybe someday a finalized version will serve their needs!

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Research, Prototype, Design and Test a Mobile Phone Interface

Night Beacon has won first place at the CHI 2010 Student Design Competition.
Download our paper (pdf)

Dates. 09/2009—04/2010
Course. Interface & Interaction Design
Collaborators. Me + 4 talented peers
URL. taehok.com/night
Summary. Night Beacon empowers people to walk at night without having to walk alone. These people can form walking groups with others while being supported by our systems of reputation, trust and safety. We updated our project website and presented our progress at each milestone throughout the semester. We have done the following:

• Interviewed potential users using contextual inquiry, in order to understand their behaviors, feelings, complications and experiences walking during the day and at night.
• Modeled personas and scenarios for each persona based on our affinity wall findings.
• Designed a “Badge Test Study” where participants would walk to a meeting place and confront a stranger holding the same badge as the participant. Through this test we learned peoples’ reactions, perceptions, and feelings about meeting and interacting with strangers.
• Formed a similar study on Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk in order to gain further insights from a different test design. This generally supported our initial findings that the badge can often be associated with authentication or a sense of commonality.
• Developed and evaluated a low-fidelity prototype of our system.
• Designed a more detailed and further refined version of our low-fidelity prototype, as a mid-fidelity prototype in Adobe Flash and on Google Android G1 phones.
• Scripted lab and field usability test materials, recruited participants, and tested the design’s interactions for further improvement. We were able to run 2 field tests that simulated the system’s real-life situation of meeting strangers at a pre-determined location.
• Interpreted feedback and responses from the usability tests to make improvements to clarity, workflow processes, labels and other interface elements.
• Prepared a published paper for submission to the CHI 2010 Conference Student Design Competition.
• Constructed a poster and final presentation illustrating our concept, both were presented at CHI 2010.

Responsibilities. I helped write the contextual inquiry interview script, created the primary user persona and scenario, helped lead and organize the badge test design, sketched early versions for the lo-fi prototype and evaluated the lo-fi prototype interactions, helped construct various screens in the mid-fi and high-fi prototypes, planned and organized the user tests including script and field test logistics, and was a primary writer on the CHI submission paper.

Result. Among plenty of excellent projects in this course, ours won a lot of interest, optimism and also fair critique. One of our main goals of this project is to push the boundaries of what may or may not be possible. It prompts discussion in the areas of mobile technology, safety, trust, privacy and human lives being shaped by computing (and vice versa)! The project won first place at CHI 2010.

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Research, Create and Design a Solution to a New Social Product

Dates. 11/2009—12/2009
Course. Information Architecture
Collaborators. Me + 2 talented peers
Summary. Our final project for this course required us to design a system for a new proposed concept called “Kids Mall USA”. This would be a retail space where kids could “sell” their artistic creations in some way. We needed to create a solution around the system that would allow scheduling, sale, navigation, and organization of content to make this possible. Through this process we:

• Discussed project scope and goals, and wrote an interview script in order to learn about potential users’ desires and needs. We then approached and interviewed several parents and their children at the local mall.
• Incorporated findings into the discovery of a system solution and constructed wireframe mockups of the main KidsCreate interface architecture.
• Submitted a report and presented the final project to three experienced professionals in the field.

Responsibilities. I helped prepare the interview script and administered a number of the interviews at the mall. I also designed wireframes for the interface, designed the report and presentation, and helped present to the class and other audience members.

Result. We received positive feedback from others, and one judge commented that the interfaces were well developed and thought out. It was a great learning experience involving a tight deadline and rapid design process. The project problem was unique and required us to develop a strong case for its feasibility.

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Analyze and Redesign an Instant Messaging Application

Dates. 06/2009—09/2009
Position. Design Intern
URL. kadu.net & season.openusability.org
Summary. Season of Usability is an organization that encourages interaction design, experience design and usability for open-source software. I worked with some of the team for Kadu, an open source chat application. It was originally created for Gadu-Gadu, a popular Polish instant messaging service. They planned to expand the application to work with other protocols, for example ICQ or Google Talk. These changes necessarily required rethinking the interaction design of the application.
Responsibilities. I began the project at the first stages of a new Kadu lo-fi prototype, and from there:

• Performed an in-depth heuristic evaluation using a combination of Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics and the KDE Human Interface Guidelines, then articulated recommendations to the issues that were identified.
• Consulted and discussed challenges and issues with Kadu members to identify solutions.
• Designed a mid-fi prototype based on the findings.
• Assembled a report presentation in order to describe the changes and interface processes to Kadu developers.

Result. The new version is continuing development, and they are incorporating the heuristic findings and using the mockups as a guide for the new interface.

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Use Scripts to Mine and Analyze Large Sets of Data

Dates. 02/2010
Course. Data Manipulation
Collaborators. Me + 2 talented peers
URL. harmic.people.si.umich.edu/lastfm

Summary. We used Perl and the Last.fm API to do some interesting exploration of tags on the music social network, Last.fm. We created both a tag explorer by artist and a side-by-side comparison of two users’ favorite artists by tags. Please check them out if you’d like, but be careful, error checking is not complete.

Responsibilities. I helped write some of the scripts that would access different parts of the Last.fm API, and organized the results into hashes so that they could be analyzed. We also gave a presentation that I made about how to use the API and about our project.

Result. This project was a great learning experience but was also simply fun to do. We had a vested interest in it, just by being fans of music and the Last.fm service, and it made the project more interesting.

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Explore & Practice Graphic Design Through Various Projects

Dates. 09/2009—12/2009
Course. Graphic Design
URL. scribd.com/mharmala
Summary. I audited a graphic design course to gain some practice amidst my other coursework. My scribd account has a sampling of projects I completed, but I look forward to more practice in the future. I feel that I really improved only over a few months.

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