Tagscape - Interact 2007

Tagscape - formerly Agge!os - is being published at Interact 2007.

Abstract. Recent years have seen an explosion in online collaborative tagging, the most prevalent visualization of which are tag clouds. Despite their popularity, tag clouds suffer from limitations of separation from tagged items, lack of relational information between tags and a less-than-fully interactive experience. In this paper we introduce Tagscape, a tag system interface that attempts to address these issues. Tagscape uses a magnet analogy to represent relationships between tags and tagged items as attractions and repulsions. Preliminary informal evaluations of the interface were positive and revealed avenues for future work.

The file is located here.

Information Architecture

This project is a redesign of the layout and information architecture of the Azureus Website. It was completed for Design for CS in less than a week in Spring of 06.

The document can be found here.

General Engineering Senior Design

Current project sponsored by Methode Electronics. The idea is to use this carbon fiber heating technology to investigate new products and markets. How is that User Experience or HCI related? (I asked myself that question too...). Our job is to explore where this could be useful - take a technology and find new, creative, and elegant ways to apply it, either in replacing existing heaters or using the features of this technology to explore places where heaters have never been possible to use.

The final report can be found here.

Project Dates: January - May 2007

Current Project Storyboard

This project has not been named, but deals with silhouettes, text messaging, and social interaction.

The idea:

When standing in front of the video wall (or projection screen) people's shadow's freeze in place. The longer they stand, the more substantial their outline. When their outline "fills in" their silhouette is frozen in place, and a text bubble appears above their virtual head. This text bubble ideally will be filled by users sending a text message to a server from their mobiles.

Our goal with this project is to encourage social interaction in a space where people typically study, meet with others, eat, and quickly walk through on their way to class. We're focusing in on creating something eye catching, but simple to interact with, that would be dynamic so those in the space on a daily basis will not be bored with it after 5 minutes. We also don't want to be terribly distracting to the people who study or work in the space (avoiding repetitive and loud sounds, for instance).

Project dates: August 2006 - May 2007

Agge!os

From Traditional cork board to interactive searchable digital flyers

Agge-what?

Agge!os...
...is prononounced agg-uh-los.
...means "a messenger" in Greek derived from the Ancient Greek root "aggello."
...is an online, interactive bulletin board developed using Processing, an open source programming language and environment (based on Java).

...was created by Spencer Koch, Sunah Suh, Lauren Haynes, and Aylin Selcukoglu -- undergraduates at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign. All four RSC (Residential Computing Staff) staff banded together to combat the outdated flyers they saw scattered about the cork boards in Siebel Center and create a unique, visually appealing bulletin board browsing experience available any time someone has access to the internet.

...was created during the Spring 2006 semester for CS 465: Principles of Interface Design taught by Professor Karrie Karahalios head of the Social Spaces Group.

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My part in this project was heavy involvement in the design, critiques, and evaluation. The design tended to be group effort, while the team split for coding and usability, where I fell in the usability side. This project definitely showed the design cycle from paper to paper, or rather paper prototype to submitting a paper for publishing.

The CHI2007 note we submitted can be found here.

The web interface itself can be found here.

The user study and interview questionnaires can be found here.

Design Notes from our Cognitive Walkthrough and Heuristic Evaluations.

Project Dates: January 2006 - May 2006

Portfolio

Easiest way to put a portfolio up and update it quickly... start a blog about it. I'll try to keep everything here HCI/Design/UI/HF related. Theoretically that should mean older stuff will fall at the bottom, and newer stuff at the top. Here we go.

Just as a reference, I got started with HCI by taking Principles of User Interfaces with Karrie Karahalios at UIUC in Spring of 2006. I've since joined her social spaces group, pursued publication of our semester project from the UI class, and started a new interactive art piece. I've taken a "Design for CS" that focused on layouts and information architecture in which I designed a poster that was used at CHI, Human Performance and Engineering Psychology, Human Factors Issues in Health care, and two semesters of Independent Study Project. Somewhere in there I attended a one day lecture by Edward Tufte on "Presenting Data and Information" in Indianapolis. It's been a rather crazy year.

The wii is a perfect example of why I like HCI and UI and HF and any of those other acronyms you want to throw out there. Observation: People move their bodies when playing video games to "influence" the motion in the game. Solution: Make the video game respond to that motion. One of those "Well duh" moments that makes a lot of very happy people.