(Once in a while I write about projects, products or other designy thoughts on my blog.)

During the semester, I sometimes UX/visual design for the Yale Student Developers.

Sample project: Pulse is an in-progress feature that the Yale College Council requested for YaleMobile, an iOS app for students. Push notifications and short, snappy surveys will help student government actually get responses from the usually apathetic student body.

 

DecentMUD

DecentMUD (better name pending) is a decentralized multi-user dungeon "game" written in C++ with Qt, whose main distinguishing feature is that every connected player is both a client and a server hosting a region in the game world, thus allowing for a continually evolving and potentially disorienting experience. It includes a simple proof of concept for an anti-cheating/accountability system based on PeerReview (Haeberlen et al. 2007). Sorry for the very rushed presentation, the time limit was 2 minutes and 10 seconds.

Shot Roulette

My first hackathon, in a mixed-ability team of two developers and two totally nontechnical people. I conceptualized and created the front end for our Y-Hack 2013 entry. Apart from writing front-end code, I also did wireframing and created personas and user flows, to narrow down the feature set we needed to implement while making the app more engaging. I attempted to delegate in a way such that our nontechnical members would have a learning experience through the hackathon. We didn't win anything, but those who stopped by our table really enjoyed playing with the tool, and often remarked on how good it looked. Try it live!

Flight Simulator IOS

I designed and developed the front end to a fully featured web-based instructor/operator station for a military flight simulator, relying heavily on jQuery and the Openlayers mapping library.

Reddit Thingimajig

I managed a project with two developers and one nontechnical member, creating a web app that gave you information about Reddit from a more social perspective than other Reddit statistics websites. I developed personas, helped us turn disparate initial ideas into a working spec with clearly defined features, created a schedule that worked with the extremely busy end-of-semester period and learning technologies that we were not familiar with, organized project meetings and kept us on track, and designed and developed the front-end. Due to time and API limitations, we didn't get to implement everything we wanted, but we had some good ideas and I'm happy with what we thought of.

 

Phishing Trip

I spearheaded a project that won first runner-up at the Google 24 Hours of Good 2014 hackathon. I came up with the initial idea, led the team through refining the vision through brainstorming sessions and user flow walkthroughs, then drew up a task list and schedule for the project and delegated accordingly. I also coded front-end, as I usually do on projects.

We managed to forget to take screenshots or save our final pitch (24 hours is a long time to go without rest), but here is a mockup I made early in the process while we were defining features, and an illustration I did for the final UI.

 

Miscellaneous

Design fixes and front-end dev for e-commerce startup Boola Market; design and front-end dev for lifestyle startup Wedding Informant.