For Fall 2008, I worked with Neema Moraveji and Prof. Scott Klemmer on revamping CS147, the introductory HCI class at Stanford. As part of the re-design, I designed and developed the course software system that students use to submit their work, as well as view others’.

The software is currently in use by two courses at Stanford, with enrollment totaling 200 students. It is implemented in Django (with jQuery). To get the system up and running, we adapted and extended as many open-source technologies as possible. Students can attach files, images, links, and other media, and view each others’ work, either in their particular section or for the whole course. Meanwhile, Teaching Assistants (TAs) can grade assignments and provide feedback, as well as generate grade reports and mark section attendance.

django-courseapp will be released as open-source after it is used for this quarter’s courses.

As the system gets real-world usage with students, I’m constantly implementing suggestions and usability improvements.

Under Prof. Scott Klemmer’s supervision, I redesigned the Stanford HCI Group’s homepage to improve its information architecture, as well as update its visuals. The final design uses CSS and DIVs rather than the previous table-based layout, embeds video dynamically using SWFobject, and allows visitors to find the subsections they’re looking for quickly. To develop this page, I created three personas who embodied potential visitors to the website, and designed with these three personas’ particular considerations in mind. Before and after pictures are below: In the spirit of continuous testing, we constantly run A/B studies and analytics on the HCI website to find out what design variations are working best.

For CS247 (Interaction Design Studio) my group of 4 worked with Saori Fotenos, a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow, on ways to boost self-esteem for children in public school in Rio de Janeiro.

The primary goals of the project were affordability, durability, maximizing the number of children that could interact with the computer at once, and most of all, fun. Our final prototype used sub-$20 USB keyboards that we modified to resemble musical instruments using foamcore and fabric, and a Flash application that output music and recorded video as the children played with the instruments.

This project was one of two projects selected for Best Project at the end-quarter fair. Also, it was featured at Maker Faire 2006 (where over 1000 people of all ages tried it out), and at a Microsoft Research Road Show in Mountain View, CA.

At the Institute of Design at Stanford (the d.school), I worked with a group of 5 on a project for Product (RED), a cross-company initiative to use consumer spending to raise money for AIDS help in Africa. Our brief was to research greeting cards, and create a design experience that functioned as a greeting card. We developed a prototype extension to the iTunes music store that used audio introductions that a sender could record to add a personalized touch to audio gifts. Click on an image (and use the ‘Next’ button that appears on the image popup) to walk through the interaction:

We performed a thorough market analysis to evaluate the number of lives that could be saved through the proceeds raised through our service, and presented our project to the leadership team at (RED).

For Prof. Scott Klemmer’s CS294 course - Integrating Physical and Digital Interactions - my group of 3 built a Tablet PC system called TimePress, meant for doctor’s offices and professor office hours, where the length of each appointment (and the number of people waiting) is unpredictable, in flux, and currently not easy to visualize. Using a gesture-based interface with large bubbles and almost no buttons, we tried to build a system that would ‘fade away’ into its environment. The system could also be accessed through a mobile phone interface, so students/patients would not have to travel to the office before knowing whether time was available. We conducted a first-use study at two professors’ office hours, and presented our final prototype at the Senior Project Fair.

In high school, frustrated by a couple of shortcomings in Mozilla Thunderbird (Mozilla’s email client), I got my first exposure to programming (and releasing) software by building extensions using Mozilla’s XUL, Javascript, and the Thunderbird extension platform. The most successful extension was addressContext, which adds Address Book management features into the main user interface. To date, addressContext has been downloaded over 60,000 times from its Mozilla Add-ons page, and has been deployed in enterprise settings in the US and Germany.