Online dating: Matching, meeting, and mapping

About the project

Interviews with online daters on behalf of Yahoo! Personals identified service design opportunities for helping daters move from online interactions to first dates. The result: MapChat, which combines local listings, chat, and maps. MapChat was deployed in beta through Yahoo! Labs in 2008, and resulted in a patent. I led experience research on the project, visualized the results as experience models, and created initial interaction and visual design specifications.

Design for urban green space

About the project

This service design and human-computer interaction research project explored how to maintain urban green spaces, expand them, and promote their use. Sponsored by Intel Research and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.

Communicating Actionable User Research

extended research model

extended research model

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Human-centered design is an approach to innovation in which user research drives design decisions by providing an understanding of end users. In practice, different people, teams, or even companies manage each step of the design process, making communication of user research results a critical activity.  Based on an empirical study of current methods used by experts, this paper presents strategies for effectively communicating user research findings across organizational or corporate boundaries.  To build researcher-client relationships, understand both user and client needs, and overcome institutional inertia, this paper proposes viewing user research clients as users of user research outcomes.  This reframing the crafting of communication across boundaries as a parallel internal human-centered design process we refer to as a double ethnography.”

 

 

Roschuni, C., Goodman, E. and Agogino, A. 2013. Communicating Actionable User Research. Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing. Pre-publication draft available here.

 

 

Familiar Strangers

About the project

As humans we come to understand the places around us using a myriad of observable cues, such as public-private, large-small, daytime-nighttime, loud-quiet, and crowded-empty. Unsurprisingly, it is the people with which we share such spaces that often dominate our perception of place. Sometimes these people are friends, family and colleagues. More often, and particularly in urban public spaces, the individuals who affect us are ones that we repeatedly observe and yet do not directly interact with – our Familiar Strangers.

This research project explored the often ignored yet very meaningful relationships with Familiar Strangers. Several experiments and studies led to a design for a personal, body-worn, wireless device that extends the Familiar Stranger relationship while respecting the delicate, yet important, constraints of our feelings and relationships with strangers in public places. Sponsored by Intel Research from 2003–4, with Eric Paulos.

More complete information on the Familiar Strangers project