I have developed a broad skill-set. On this page I will describe how I have used these skills professionally and during my doctoral studies. For more information on my research, see my research page. See my resume for more information regarding the places I've worked.
Research [Study Design, Data Analysis]
General Skills [Leadership, Independent Work, Presentation]
User Experience [Think-Aloud, Interviewing, Heuristic Evaluation, Artifact Analysis…]
Technical [Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Design Tools…]
Primary Research Methods
Successful research requires a variety of general skills. You must be adept at quickly understanding difficult concepts in new domains, evaluating previous work, and construct well-founded arguments and hypotheses. HCI requires comfort with a variety of methods in fields as diverse as design, computer-science, and psychology. Still, most researchers are strongest with a few methods. Mine are the following:
- Study Design: in consultation with my advisor, I have developed a variety of empirical studies. Though I am very familiar with others, the main methods I use are the following:
- Experimental Evaluations: I have developed four experimental evaluations of online note-taking interfaces.
- Design Studies: I conduct iterative design studies to evaluate both interface attributes and user attitudes, and trade them off with learning objectives.
- Data Analysis
- Statistics: My experimental studies require a variety of detailed statistical analyses.
- Excel: I use excel and VBA for parsing, coding, and early analyses of student note-taking data.
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General Skills
- Team Player and Leader: I have experience both managing small teams and actively participating in dynamic development teams.
- BigFix: As a content manager, I was responsible for planning and coordinating the creation of security patch management content. I led a team of seven part-time content engineers.
- Digital Jones: as one of early employees, I helped train new hires.
- Project Management: I have been responsible for a variety of projects in industry and during my doctoral studies.
- BigFix:I scheduled both our own content creation, and managed the content we produced for clients.
- Research: I am responsible for designing and implementing my note-taking interfaces, constructing and conducting my studies, and writing papers and presentations.
- Digital Jones: As a knowledge engineer I was responsible for recruiting salesmen and turning their knowledge into a functional shopping advisor. I developed five full featured advisors, and rapidly prototyped several more for sales visits.
- Presentation: As a researcher, you must be able to effectively disseminate your work in both written and oral form. I have presented my work at several top conferences, including CHI. Some of these presentations involve audiences of several hundred people.
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User Experience Skills
I began my education in user experience research as an undergraduate, helped teach HCI methods as a Ph.D. Student, and have used the skills both in industry and at CMU. While I have been trained in a variety of methods, I use the following most often:
- Think-Aloud: All studies below include both design, analysis, and documentation of recommendations.
- CMU: I have conducted 5 think-aloud studies of OLI learning technology, which is distributed to a range of universities.
- Digital Jones: I co-led the first usability evaluation and redesign of our shopping advisors.
- Research: My design studies involve the use of think-aloud protocol for the collection of user data.
- Structured Interviewing:
- Digital Jones: I used a semi-structured interviewing process to elicit knowledge from consumer electronic salesmen to first extract the sales process, the product and consumer attributes of interest, followed by the use of software aids to understand how the attributes were weighted against each other.
- Contextual Inquiry: I have been trained in contextual inquiry as an undergraduate, taught it as a graduate student, and used it to structure some of my note-taking research.
- Artifact Analysis: The artifacts people produce are a great resource for understanding users.
- Empirical: My research involves parsing the note-taking data I collect, and then coding it according to features such as idea, wordiness, and wording. I then compare the coded notes with learning outcomes. For example, I have found copy-pasters record notes faster than typists, and use more words, but perform just as well, indicating the possibility of creating a more efficient note-taking tool.
- Walkthrough: Interviews can often be grounded in users' artifacts. One of my research methods has been to analyze students' notes and then interview them regarding interesting portions of their notes.
- Heuristic Evaluation: While I believe primarily in collecting behavioral data, heuristic evaluation goes a long way in locating major breakdowns, identifying areas of interest for user studies, and is especially important given time or resource constraints. I have used heuristic evaluation prior to all of the think-aloud user studies mentioned above.
- Surveys: My research includes the creation and analysis of surveys during each of my experimental studies. I have training in creating valid survey items.
- Visual Design: While I am not a gifted visual artist, I am comfortable with layout, wireframes, and storyboarding. I have taken coursework in visual and interaction design, and have experience working with visual designers and evaluating visual design.
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Technical Skills
I've taken about 8 computer science undergraduate courses and have created several interactive online AJAX applications. I will have samples up when time permits.
- Javascript: I have written about 10K lines of Javascript code. These include a full-featured Mozilla and IE compliant text-editor, a highlighting tool, and sortable/editable lists using Yahoo!'s user interface library.
- Other Web: I use PHP to connect my interfaces with my MySQL databases. I am comfortable with both, but not as experienced as I am with Javascript.
- OOP: I am familiar with Object Oriented Programming from my undergraduate education; some of my javascript applications are object oriented.
- VBA: I have developed VBA programs to automatically code the note-taking data I gather during my research.
- Design Tools: I have used Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Flash to prototype interfaces. I sometimes have fun with Denim, but don't have the tablet to take best advantage.
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