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Overview
As a graduate student, I participated in both the 2007 and 2008 International Computer-Human Interaction conference’s student design competition with a group of other HCI graduate students. The CHI guidelines for 2007 were “to design a service to promote or encourage the use of public transit. The solutions should follow a user centered design process, supported by background and, if possible, ethnographic research of the solution space.”
Challenges
- As a first-semester student, I was new to many HCI concepts being used in this project, as were all members of my team.
- One of our inital team members dropped out during the first semester.
- This project was in addition to my existing course load (16 credits) and work schedule (20 hrs/week).
- I ended up doing far more than 25% of the work for the project.
Results
Our team of 4 traveled to San Jose, California and presented our poster. Though we did not advance to the finals, I gained valuable insight into UX skills and techniques, as well as teamwork.
Process
- Our team of four has developed a carpooling application.
- We interviewed users and conducted literature research, then compiled our data in an affinity diagram to decide on the current system
- We used personas and scenarios to further flesh out our ideas
- I built a lo-fidelity paper prototype of CarLoop, followed by a high-fi prototype in HTML, CSS, and Javascript
- We then conducted user testing with several users to improve our prototype
- We submitted a paper on CarLoop to the CHI 2007 Student Design Competition, and were one of twelve teams selected
- At the end of April, we flew to San Jose and presented our poster for the CHI competition.