At EchoUser, we pride ourselves on staying curious and constantly honing our craft. That’s why we launched a new professional development initiative at the beginning of this year, to continue learning new skills by sharing our expertise with each other. Deirdre Hirschtritt and I kicked off the series by tackling a favorite and feared method among researchers: Contextual Inquiry.
It was good timing because we had a number of generative research projects in the pipeline for clients spanning from enterprise software to public services. We wanted this to be more than just a refresher on the textbook basics of Contextual Inquiry, we wanted our coworkers to come away with some hands-on experience and ideas about how the method could fit into projects they are working on now.
In the end, we created Wolf Goes to School, a modern twist on the classic game Mafia, played collaboratively through Twitch Chat. We delivered a prototype of the first round of the game, complete with the script, visuals, animations, and Twitch Chat integration.
In this portion of the project, we wanted to validate our new script and Twitch Chat voting system with real users before investing too much time in actually developing the AI that ran the game. The idea for a user testing session came about and was completed in 3 days. The user testing session was essential to developing our final script revisions and defining future iterations of the game.
For the session, the Twitch Chat integration still had to be built, so we instead simulated the chat structure of the game on Slack. I played the role of the wizard behind the curtain - pasting the narration and dialogue into the Slack channel, keeping track of time for conversation and voting, and counting up player votes by hand. The test revealed several key opportunities for iteration in the game design:
Prime chat conversation before game starts
Tweak dialogue-picking algorithm to give better hints
Add history commands
This was part of a 8-week team project to formulate, design, and prototype a gaming experience for Twitch.tv, to be played collaboratively for the course Twitch Plays Game Design from Jessica Hammer and Jeffrey Bigham at Carnegie Mellon University.
How might we enable people with dietary restrictions to safely and healthily order food for delivery from a conversational UI?
Carrie is a voice assistant designed to help people with dietary restrictions order meals for delivery. The system can pull from a personal food profile or pair with third party apps to suggest and order the best meal for you. Carrie also offers the benefits of a conversational UI by allowing for hands-free use and seamlessly handling interruptions in the conversation.
We conducted experience prototyping with a lo-fi prototype script and 4 users, to smooth out the conversational flow and uncover opportunities for future iterations. The video to the left is a concept demo we created to show to stakeholders and elicit more feedback.
This was a team project for Interaction Design Studio at Carnegie Mellon, taught by John Zimmerman.
Socius is a two-sided platform to help better allocate resources to food pantries serving low-income communities in the Pittsburgh area. I worked on the side built to collect needs directly from the populations served by food pantries by allowing them to give feedback and request specific items.
I led a series of onsite interviews and usability studies at a partner food pantry to evaluate a later-stage prototype of the platform. With my research insights, the team improved the functionality of the website and planned their first pilot test in the wild.
The first phase of the research was to conduct intercept interviews in the waiting room of the food pantry. The goal was to gather insights into how pantry patrons think about the items they need most, and to understand how much information they are willing to share with potential donors.
In the second phase of research, I carried out usability studies of the workflow to request items. I also scoped out the food pantry as a site for pilot testing the site with real users by speaking with pantry staff and mapping the space.
This was an 8-week project under the guidance of Professor Min Kyung Lee at Carnegie Mellon University.
Caring for a loved one suffering from dementia is an extremely taxing and stressful experience. Often a single person is tasked with the majority of the work, with secondary caregivers unsure of when to step in and help.
How might we decrease the burden of caring for a loved one with dementia while increasing the pride people feel when they care for a loved one in need?
SuperCare is an emergency system that helps delegate and communicate care between multiple caregivers. One of the most common emergencies for dementia patients is wandering off and getting lost. With SuperCare, when a dementia patient wanders outside their designated safety zone, the system intelligently delegates one of the caregivers in their network to retrieve them and return them home safely. SuperCare also encourages gratitude and appreciation among caregivers, to foster a community centered on the patient.
This was a 6-week team project for Interaction Design Studio at Carnegie Mellon, taught by Karen Berntsen.
We are all well aware of the obesity problem in the United States, but few see the toll it is taking on our pets. More than 59% of cats and 54% of dogs in the US are overweight or obese. Common causes for unhealthy weight levels for pets are overfeeding, due to lack of owner education or the convenience of having replenishing bowls that allow pets to graze throughout the day.
How might we use existing technology to serve pets the right portion and curb the pet obesity epidemic?
The Best Friend Feeder (BFF) is a smart pet feeder that uses the pet’s daily weight and activity levels to serve it the optimal portion. The pitch video (left) communicates the main features of the BFF, to share with stakeholders and garner feedback from potential users.
We shared our pitch video with 30 potential users, ages 18-50, to gather feedback on the product concept:
Overall, people enjoyed the usage scenarios depicted in the video.
There were concerns over the cost of the unit, brought on by its height and the multiple devices used to calculate each meal.
Other potential users did not like the intrusiveness of the push notifications, and would expect to be able to control those in some way.
This was a 6-week team project for Interaction Design Studio at Carnegie Mellon University, taught by Karen Bernsten.
