Interaction & Service Design

In response to Microsoft’s Health & Wellness design challenge, an interdisciplinary team of five took the challenge of empowering patients and improving the patients experiences at UPMC Southside ortho unit. We conducted user research including interviews, surveys, collage and diary studies to understand patients' journeys and experiences. From the data, we saw the opportunities in improving the communication between patients and nurses, doctors, and family members. We proposed both high-tech and low-tech solutions including a bed-side communication hub for patients, a hand-held device for nurses and a welcome kit.

Final presentation (pdf)

Popcorn is a mobile application for teens to invite friends to go out for a movie, negotiate movie selection as well as other factors such as time, place and transportation. The challenges included small screen size, designing for teen needs, and accommodating for negotiations over mobile phones. We created a personae as a busy teen who juggles multiple extra-curricular activities and want to maximize social interactions with her friends. We focused on making the interface efficient and pleasurable while keeping in mind the constraints today's teens face as well as their social behaviors.

The challenge was to design an intelligent home agent that improves the quality of people's lives in a home environment. Specifically, we saw opportunities to increase the feelings of reward in clothes care & maintenance in a family with working parents and children. After conducting user research, we generated more than 50 concepts which we grouped into needs and then validated with users. What came out was a smart home agent that supports all family members to participate in the clothes care processes by allowing them to share knowledge, providing fail-safe mechanisms, and providing awareness of the ongoing laundry process. Our solution was captured in a video sketch.

Final presentation (pdf)
Project Website

Vino is a personalized wine recommendation and management website for small restaurant owners. It aims to increase the confidence of restaurant owners by having online expert reviewers that provides personalized feedback for food and wine pairings based on their menu, customer preferences, and wine inventory data. It then allows restaurant owners to educate himself as well as his staff about wine management, selection and customer preferences. We used a persona, derived mental models of restaurant owners from user research, and data from competitive analysis to solidify our design that is emotionally compelling and meet the needs of such niche market.