Mike Harmala

User Experience Design Portfolio

Suit Up

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/​i​n​t​e​g​r​a​ted
Course URL. kerrykao​.com/​s​i​694
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!

Images.