Mike Harmala

User Experience Design Portfolio

Night Beacon

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/​n​i​ght
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.

Images.