Main Contributions
- UI Design
- Front-end Development
- Accessibility Engineering
Tools
- Django
- Bootstrap 4
- SCSS
- WAV Accessibility Tool
Projects
Here's a selection of some of the things I've worked on over the years.
Sorry,
that's all I got right now!
U.S. Senate Electronic Financial Disclosures
U.S. Senate Web App
Most of the web apps that I help make for the Senate are internal, but every once in a while I work on something that constituents get to use too!
Electronic Financial Disclosures (eFD) is a web app that allows senators, candidates, and staff to file public disclosures describing their financials as it's legally required by the STOCK Act. There is also an administrative side used to process applications.
When I was introduced to the project, it became clear that it more and more dificult to work on compared to other Senate apps because of its use of the Bootstrap 2 framework. To bring the app up to more current experience standards, I worked with two other developers to update application and printing templates to Bootstrap 4.
I also took steps to improve the accessibility of the applications by auditing for potential issues like missing form labels, skip links, keyboard access, or contrast issues and resolved them.
Main Contributions
- UI Design
- Full-stack Development
Tools
- Sketch
- PHP
- Drupal
American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI.org) Website Redesign
ABI Web Site
This website redesign is a currently still in development. Check back later for more!
Children First Daycare Website
Children First Childcare Center Web Site
A website built quickly to communicate news to parents during COVID-19 lockdown procedures in Tennessee. Write-up in progress.
Main Contributions
- UI Design
- Web Development
Tools
- Python (Flask, Pytorch)
- Google Cloud Compute
- Wordpress
Otograph Machine Learning Health Tool
Otograph Web App
An interesting web application & project. I worked with a Washington, DC company to build a website and application to allow parents to upload photos of their child's inner ear and have its health assesed by a a machine learning script provided by another researcher. Write-up in progress.
Outcomes
Campus Labs Web App
While living in Buffalo, NY (aka "Southern Canada"), I worked as lead user experience designer for a SaaS application called Outcomes. This product allows universities and colleges to define, track, and measure student learning outcomes offered coursework throughout their institution. This was my first time working internally on an enterprise application — simpling saying that I learned a lot would be an understatement.
As part of a Scrum team of four, I iteratively sketched, prototyped, and tested to help this get this product from infancy to its first contracted customers. In addition to being responsible for interaction, usability, and future features, I also took time to audit and implement accessibility improvements.
Clemson Online Web Redesign
Clemson University Web Site
While undertaking my master's in 2013, I worked at Clemson University's Online Education department as a User Experience Specialist managing web content and performing usability evaluations of the school's learning management systems. After being asked to update the overall design of their public site, I set off to conduct a comprehrensive user-centered approach to redesigning.
Working alone, I conducted user interviews with current and prospective students, faculty, and other stakeholders to learn the needs a Clemson Online site needed to accomplish. I measured the site's current effectiveness with a competitive benchmark, judging it against other higher education platforms against a set of criteria.
With this data, I worked with stakeholders to define initial business requirements. From here, it was a process of iteration, moving from sketches to code and back to arrive at a final Cascade template files delivered.
Live Survey Data Project
IA Summit 2016 Web App
I worked with two of my friends from graduate school, Matt Russell and Andrew Barrocas, to survey IA Summit 2016 attendees about their careers in design. The survey, which was conducted live at the event via Google Forms, explores a UX professional's history, current work, and their outlook on the field.
I helped design the app, wrote the copy, and implemented the code, which is mainly Bootstrap, some jQuery and D3.js by way of a additional charting library. The app was supposed to be a conversation starter, so the cool thing about the project is that the visualizations would automatically update every 5 minutes to show how people were responding - I even got to talk to Louis Rosenfield about the findings as they happened!
Comparative LMS Usability Study
Clemson University Usability Study
Another large project I worked on while at Clemson University, this usability study compares the faculty use of two learning management systems (LMS) considered for use at Clemson University, Blackboard Learn and Canvas.
In late 2012, Canvas was being considered by the school to replace Blackboard Learn as the core delivery system for both fully online and hybrid courses. To assist the department in validating the choice to pilot Canvas, I and two others conducted a series of usability tests with Clemson faculty to evaluate and document potential usability issues in each system.
In the final report, we were able to recommend implementing Canvas over Blackboard Learn because of its greater ease-of-use baseline, and provide several recommendations to improve general usability in each.
LMS Heuristic Evaluation
Hawkes Learning Usability Study
I performed a heuristic evaluation and task analysis for Hawkes Learning Systems, an education software company based in Charleston, SC as part of a graduate school project.
Hawkes was provided a short report summarizing the method and with screenshot-annotated findings. For each instance, I mentioned the heuristic that was being broken, explained why it was harmful, and, if possible, a solution.
For example, a major issue I found by purposely inputting an incorrect access code during the design up process. The system appeared to check validity by checking the length of inputted characters, and would allow the user to progress through the sign up process. Only two pages later would an error return when the key was validating, which allows the user to lose time, work, and patience.
Remote Card Sort
Campus Labs Usability Study
This is the product of a remote open card sort that I did while I was working at Campus Labs. There are several, several different methods available to an instructor or administrator to measure the impact of a student's learning. To investigate a painfully long dropdown issue in a product containing a set of 50 of these terms, I set out to do a remote unmoderated card sort utilizing Trello Boards and a lot of Microsoft Excel.
I reformatted the data sets and using some R code snippets as described in this article, I produced this dendrogram of method categories summarizing the common points made by the 13 SMEs sampled. We ended up using this to implement a new dropdown selector that separated items into categories, essentially making it easier for users to find and explore options, and also provide us with useful and interesting metadata.