Wine Know is a digital shopping assistant that helps wine shoppers navigate the wine buying process in grocery stores. The process is supported by implementing a faceted navigation system that lets users browse a store's wines by applying filters for price, varietal, region and based on editorial recommendations. Additionally, the device, which is designed to exist in the wine aisle, includes wine descriptions and reviews that help less experienced customers overcome the anxiety around choosing a bottle of wine.
The product was designed after extensive contextual interviews, direct observation in grocery stores and surveys. Concept screening and selection matrices were employed to determine key functionality. Financial modeling and interviews with retail experts were conducted to evaluate the business feasibility of the device.
I served as lead user researcher and interaction designer in a group that included two Haas MBA students, two engineering students and one design student from San Jose State University's industrial design program.
Skills: Product Management, Contextual Interviews, Personas, Concept Screening and Selection, Financial Modeling
The sale of American services in China is an important growth area for U.S. corporations and the U.S.-China balance of trade. Firms such as IBM and McKinsey have been successful at adding value to clients in the U.S. by tapping into their wide networks of human capital and applying them in appropriate situations. However, because of China's relatively closed network economy and distance from the U.S., firms such as IBM and McKinsey's greatest challenge is in developing human capital capable of effectively applying their companies' networks of resources in China while, for reasons of efficiency, remaining relatively autonomous from company leadership in the U.S.
This paper was originally developed for Information Management Systems 210: Information Services Design under the guidance of Professors Bob Glushko and AnnaLee Saxenian at UC Berkeley. It was subsequently selected for the Information Services Design Symposium at the UC Berkeley School of Information and published as part of the UC Berkeley iSchool Report series.
I currently serve as the Editor-in-Chief of the HardballTimes.com, a position I have held since being promoted from copy editor in October, 2006. My responsibilities to the site include developing new features, setting style, recruiting and managing writers and content and helping to edit the Hardball Times books.
Since I took over the site, I've developed new editorial features for the site and designed and implemented the site's first customer research initiative, which have helped the site strategically position itself as one of the leading baseball commentary and analysis sites on the internet.
Over the past few months, traffic has increased by over 30% over the same time last year, the Hardball Times published its fourth Annual and second preseason projection book with leading baseball publisher Acta Sports, with currently 12,000 copies in print, and is consistently rated as one of the most influential baseball blogs by striketwo.net.
Skills: Leadership, Project Management, Communication, Writing, Strategy
This recommendations document is a set of usability recommendations made by myself and a team of two other School of Information Masters candidates and a Psychology graduate student after a usability study of Flickr. We conducted six contextual interviews, ran a focus group of six Flickr users and implemented a survey of 36 users. This study was conducted for Information Systems and Management 214: Needs and Usability Assessment under the guidance of Professor Nancy Van House at UC Berkeley.
Skills: Contextual Interviews, Focus Groups, Survey Design, Work Modeling
Wardrobe Helper is a digital assistant that supports users' cognitive processes as they decide what to wear in the morning. It is based on a rapid contextual study of college students' clothes choosing behavior conducted during Cognitive Science 102C: Cognitive Engineering, under the guidance of Professor David Kirsh at UCSD.
I served as the project manager of a group that consisted of five other Cognitive Science undergrads and one Computer Science major.
Skills: Project Management, Contextual Interviews, Affinity Diagrams, Work Models, Personas, Storyboards
This paper analyzes the newsroom of a newspaper as a distributed cognition system in which information flows from person to person to ultimately generate outputs. Specifically, it analyzes how the New York Times system broke down during the Jayson Blair scandal. This paper was written for Cognitive Science 102A: Distributed Cognition under the guidance of Professor Edwin Hutchins at UCSD.