These projects were for a database course during my graduate studies. Learning databases were a fundamentals course for my program.

Repositories I've used for the database course:

1. Relational Model
2. Simple SQL
3. Intermediate SQL
4. Advanced SQL
5. More Advanced SQL

This was a project made for an Android Development elective course during my graduate studies. The purpose of the app is to make notes at the users leisure where the user can navigate the screens and keep the content of the notes persistent. Android Studio was the IDE used.

The repository for the code can be linked here: Android repository.

This was a project for an IOS development elective course during my graduate studies. Below is a link to the repository. repository link

The original city website actually went through a rebrand as my partner and I worked on this project. The most current website can be found at this link: here.

Here, you can read the the proposal for the project to our professor: Proposal Draft

The content inventory was meant to categorize the existing content of the website. You can read through it with this link: Content Inventory

The final deliverables can be downloaded with this PDF link here: Deliverables

🍁 Rouyn Noranda Welcomes You. 🍁

Information Architecture- Group 2

May 16 2022

Project Overview

Rouyn-Noranda is a small town in Northern Quebec in the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region, with a population of over 42 000 people.

This project will look at the way information is organized for non-locals, who know less about the town, vs locals, who tend to know more. The website caters more towards established locals because of how information centered around already living there is concentrated in a smaller number of clearly labeled areas.

Our goal is to reconfigure the navigation to make it easier and more efficient for non- locals, be it tourists or newcomers, to access the information they need about the town.

Major Content Items

Information presented on the homepage shows five categories. We will be focusing on the English version of the website.

History

There is a bunch of content on how the town came to be starting off as multiple different settlements. Each settlement had something unique about them and eventually the communities came together to form Rouyn-Noranda.

Visiting/ Newcomers

Resources and information for visiting tourists who want to sight- see as well as needed sources for new faces who want to move to the area and adjust to a new life there.

Business

Mining and metallurgy are the driving economic industries of the area, but many smaller businesses can thrive too. Here are the resources and information needed for such ventures. There are resources for contractors who want to work with local businesses too.

Transportation

Different methods of getting to the area via provincial highways, local highways or the Rouyn airport. The Rouyn airport is also useful for commercial travel. Information on public transport is also listed.

Life in Rouyn-Noranda

What is it like to live in this town as a student? What about a full-time worker with a family? There are also several events held in town at various points of the year to get more involved and different municipal organizations to get involved within the local political scene.

Personas

Persona 1

Ron. The new graduate who wants to start life in a small town.

Persona 2

Janine. The tourist who wants to get to know rural Canada.

Scenarios

Scnario 1

You found a town to have a new start in.

Scenario 2

You are visiting rural Canada for the first time.

Scenario 3

You are looking for work in Rouyn-Noranda.

Testing Process

Content Inventory

Our group proceeded to lay out the website's information architecture into a content inventory, using each component of the main navigation, there was a total of 113 content items.

Purpose

The inventory would help the group understand the main components of the website and evaluate a more efficient organizational scheme for the user.

What we learned

There were too many links in the website's main navigation. Certain pages contained links that lead to other parts of the navigation. The existing category names were unclear at what information they presented based on the user scenario possibilities. Localization added to the ambiguity of the naming conventions of the navigation.

Card Sorts

From the initial content inventory, areas of opportunity to reorganize were found. Three card sorts were conducted: Open card sort, closed card sort, and another closed card sort for validation purposes. Our group used OptimalSort to conduct the card sort testings. Participants were recruited by family, friends and social media connections. The following sections are the results and changes.

Round 1: Open

There were 2 parcipants for the first card sort as a pilot card sort, with 3 iterations per participant. This was an open card sort.

Results

Round2: Closed

There were 6 participants for the second card sort. This was a closed card sort.

Results

Needs Changes?

Round 3: Closed, validation

This closec card sort serves to validate the result of the second round of card sorts.

Results

Task Based Tests

Treejack Test

Tasks

You are visiting rural Canada for the first time. You're looking for something to do. Where would you look for that information?

You want to move to a small town, but it's a big step? Where could you find information to start the moving process?

You settled in to Rouyn-Noranda, but you need to find work to pay the bills. Where would you find that information?

This paper was for a prototyping and implementation course during my graduate studies. This course fell under the Human Computer Interaction concentration of my department. We were to discuss two papers and how each author approached the topic of user experience and design.

Provided here is a link to the donwloadable pdf of my own discussion of the two aforementioned articles: Discussion PDF.

I have provided my discussion of the Rettig and Erickson articles under the links as well. Scroll down to read.

A Look into the Nuance of UX from a Programmer

Technology as a field is a vast field that extends more than what people outside the domain expect it to be often. As someone who comes from an artistic background learning programming, this has been confirmed again and again throughout my time studying computer science. The concentration of human computer interaction, often colloquially referred to as UX, has been the most enlightening part in seeing the intricacies of how people interact with technology. From the developer's side, who tends to focus on the code that builds an application, I've found that the information extracted from user centered tests involving prototypes to have the most nuance in planning out a software product.

The Tiny Fingers article by Mark Rettig talked about the advantages of a paper prototype mainly. Some of the ideas discussed started with how the field of human computer interaction evolved from the emphasis on software and fidelity to the efficiency of low fidelity and how important that can be. The advantages of the low fidelity were explained in the context of the timeline of a product's development so this offered efficiency benefits because it's cheap and easy to change making iteration easier to streamline through.

As mentioned, going with a high-fidelity prototype from the start has the risk of not getting enough valuable information from such a detailed prototype early in the development process (Rettig 1994). The kind of valuable information in question can potentially speak to how well the usability measures to the user. According to Rettig, developers can prioritize usability more during the planning stages of the project. This allows for the “formative evaluation” Rettig explains in detail in the article.

The entire process from ideation to prototyping is consistent with what is taught in DePaul's User Centered Design class. From what has been taught so far in this prototyping class, the development process is the same (because both classes explore the same field), except students will have the opportunity to dive more into the later stages of the development process of UX (where in contrast, the start of the process focused more on the research aspects of UX). Both of the aforementioned articles from Erickson and Rettig explore the standard development and design process in detail. The ideation part of the process does share similarities to how a programmer would plan out how to implement a software, but the high-level concepts differ.

The Notes on Design paper seems to focus more on the design and development process in the scope of how large organizations handle it, so good communication becomes tantamount to the project's chance of success. Although they do bring up the communicative aspect of individual work through the importance of physical artifacts in the design process (Erickson 1995). Furthermore, the influences at what kicks off the communication over the project is also multi-faceted.

There is a bigger focus in the Erickson paper about the different audiences that come up during the design and development cycle of an application or product, however unlike the Tiny Fingers article. The diversity of one single facet of an audience, like the design team as mentioned, is considered more and what kind of knowledge the varying disciplines contribute to the project at hand (Erickson 1995).

Erickson also goes into more detail about design artefacts that Rettig doesn't focus on as much, stories. The story's role in the design and development process explained by both authors play the part in considering how users would approach a certain problem using the product the designers are trying to design and develop, or a “framework” (Erickson 1995). Because of how unpredictable users can be, stories help consider that ambiguity before any solid plan is fully committed to. This would mean that designers are given a fair degree of adaptability to work with during the beginning stages of the design process, what Erickson calls the “exploratory stage” (Erickson 1995). To add on to the use of stories, Erickson goes onto explain the equalizing benefits of them in the team project, similar to the low fidelity prototype that comes up later in the process (Erickson 1995). To summarize, because both authors use the context of a large organization to explain their individual concepts, UX teams in bigger organizations tend to have various disciplines because it's such a collaborative field. Stories help get across concepts that may normally only be clear to certain disciplines if discussed formally.

In the field of UX, especially in large organizations both authors use to contextualize the type of project that's common enough to explain in such articles, teams that design a product and develop it can have people from so many different fields and disciplines. Likewise, the development stages explained in the Notes on Design Paper are emphasized as not “clearly separated” unlike the Tiny Fingers article (Erickson 1995). Take the Refinement stage for example, where the project is at a point where the designers know what the product is supposed to accomplish (Erickson 1995). However, the planning and discussions involved here lends to what is discussed by Rettig when the benefits of the lo-fi prototype in the process get explained more in detail in terms of determining requirements for the project. This is where Rettig describes preparing for testing. Returning to the core of what both mentioned articles share, prototypes, designers must consider that each kind of prototype made will be used for different kinds of information gathering. The testing Rettig describes includes the use of low fidelity prototyping, but the information there is to convey the overall concept of a product (Erickson 1995). Designers at this point tend to not prioritize the interactivity in their prototype just yet. That's saved for when more data is gathered.

From what I have learned in DePaul's User Centered Design class, the low fidelity prototype our team built did in fact go through several iterations just as Rettig's examples had, although the difference there is we used a low fidelity software prototype to get around location differences between the group of designers and the users we tested the prototype with. The reasoning for low fidelity included the tight deadline but the ease at adding changes with each user test was easier to grasp in practice than in theory. The “vision prototype” acted closely to a low fidelity prototype because it's generally quite easy to get lost in adding details when working with a software prototype. The biggest challenge to this phase of our team's product development is the very advantage Erickson described when the development stages were ambiguously separated (Erickson 1995). It may help in flexibility in planning but to a design team that is still figuring out their baring's into a new field, it makes gauging the team progress incredibly difficult. With a tight time, frame of a school project, there isn't always time for lengthy discussions of ideas. Plus, some of our group members were new to the high-level concepts involved in UX, what Erickson calls the “exploratory stage” (Erickson 1995).

In short, technological projects that heavily rely on users have a nuance in their high-level concepts that contrast starkly to the high-level concepts one would find in programming. The user adds a layer of unpredictability that poses both a flexibility and obstacle to how to tackle a problem. And that's if the team of designers can figure out what the problem is at hand. This is why prototyping plays such a vital role in UX, whether that team of designers is multidisciplinary or not. That data gathered thanks to the prototyping and testing lets the team know how to move forward.

Citation

Rettig, Marc. “Prototyping for tiny fingers.” Commun. ACM 37 (1994): 21-27. Erickson, Thomas. “Notes on design practice: stories and prototypes as catalysts for communication.” (1995).

Provided here are links to downloadable versions of the articles discussed.

Tiny Fingers PDF

Notes on Design PDF

Idea and Introduction

The availability of public bathrooms for tourists and locals is not always obvious in major cities like Chicago. The existing mobile applications do not always have the most updated location despite having other details like keys, cleanliness, and accessibility information. This product will focus on providing the most accurate, detailed, and extensive list of public restrooms in any city. The PeezyFind mobile and smart watch application will include maps and augmented reality to aid the user in finding the most efficient way to the nearest public restroom.

Sketches during Charette

The sketches below provide a visual to the ideation and design charette phase of product development. The primary focus was on the augmented reality functionality therefore, a mobile phone interface was the first one that was considered. After developing the mobile interface sketches, the addition of a smart watch interface became a simple integration. Current mobile map applications have an option of also using a smart watch for navigation. Figure 2.0 details sketches for the added smart watch interface. An obstacle that came up during the sketching portion of the charette was whether our product would need a profile and log in feature (illustrated in Figure 1.2). There is a bigger convenience to the user not needing to log in to search public restrooms in their area, so Figure 3.0 focuses on that user situation.

Concept sketches:

1/5

Figure 1.0

2/5

Figure 1.1

3/5

Figure 1.2

4/5

Figure 2.0

5/5

Figure 3.0

❮ ❯

Personas

Scenarios

1. Eden, a local, helps lead a sightseeing day trip with their family and wants to make sure everyone knows how to get to the nearest public restroom with ease.
   1. Before: Determines which sightseeing spots the family wants to see, checks where local bathrooms are in her specified radius, sends bathroom locator link to family members.
      1. After a few weeks of mentally preparing and researching local attractions for a big family gathering, Eden double checks for spots her family wanted to see the most. She checks the application for where the local public bathrooms are in the area and their proximity to the sights. This will ensure the aunts and uncles know where to take their younger kids in case any of them need to use the bathroom or if any accidents happen. After finding all that information she sends the location links to her family before she meets up with them.
   2. During: Shows family members how AR directions to bathroom works, shows how map to public bathrooms works, and details about bathrooms to make the pit stop quick.
      1. During the trip one of the aunties tells Eden that one of the kids needs a restroom and they want to make sure they understand the link Eden sent. Eden shows them how the directions work and how to get to the list of details about a specific location while her younger cousin is squirming next to Eden's aunty.
   3. After: Look up locations for neighborhoods that aren't visited as much for future day trips
      1. Since the family sightseeing trip went well, Eden realizes the app could be useful for her own day trips exploring neighborhoods she has not gotten the chance to see much of yet, and knowing where public bathrooms are will help make the trip more bearable.
2. Jessica, a tourist, finds restrooms in Chicago with PeezyFinder.
   1. Before: She was looking excited about visiting the city's attractions, but she was concerned about finding clean and easily accessible public restrooms. Her previous encounters with untrustworthy restroom-finding applications had left her dissatisfied and looking for a more dependable alternative for her vacation.
   2. During: Jessica got the PeezyFinder app to help her with her restroom-finding issues. She launched the app and entered her present location in Millennium Park, where she was pleasantly surprised to find an extensive list of public restrooms with thorough cleanliness and accessibility ratings. The program plotted these facilities on a map, allowing her to readily locate neighboring restrooms that fit her requirements. She easily approached her selected restroom using PeezyFinder's navigation and augmented reality features, confident that it would be clean and accessible as promised. Jessica depended on PeezyFinder whenever nature called throughout her day of travel, enjoying clean and hassle-free toilet experiences that enriched her overall vacation.
   3. After: essica was pleased with her time in Chicago, owing to PeezyFinder's aid. She finished her explorations in the city's attractions, restaurants, and cultural institutions without having to worry about seeking a restroom. Her great experience prompted her to submit a nice comment on the app store, thanking PeezyFinder for helping to make her visit memorable and stress-free. Jessica also happily suggested the app to her companions, knowing it would improve their Chicago and beyond travel experiences.

Competitive Analysis

Takeaways & Suggestions for PeezyFind post-analysis:

The key features of similar applications listed in the competition analysis show heavy similarities, so to stand out, PeezyFind would have to provide a more extensive overview of amenities in a more customizable way. Below are key points, considering physical & emotional needs to users, business monetization and effective experience.

• User-Centric Design: Prioritize user comfort and ease during restroom searches. Implement features like a “Rush Restroom” for urgent situations, which directs users to the nearest available restroom and provides a reassuring message.
• Restroom Partnerships: Collaborate with businesses to promote their restrooms within the app. Offer businesses advertising space, featured listings, and cleanliness rating boosts in exchange for sponsorship.
• Adaptive UI: Implement an adaptive user interface that adjusts to different device types and screen sizes, optimizing the experience for both mobile and smartwatch users.
• Inclusive Restroom Categories: Include a category for "Gender-Neutral Restrooms" that users can select to find restrooms suitable for everyone. Emphasize the importance of inclusive restroom facilities for all gender identities.
• Accessibility Icons: Use clear accessibility icons or symbols to indicate restrooms that are wheelchair accessible. This helps users quickly identify restrooms suitable for those with mobility challenges.
• Virtual Queues: In some cases, users may encounter restrooms with predictable but busy periods, such as during intermissions at events, during peak travel times, or in busy shopping areas. Joining a virtual queue can provide them with an estimated wait time, allowing them to plan their restroom break more effectively.

Mood Board

Calm and Convenient: The PeezyFind Mood-board

Discover the essence of PeezyFind through our thoughtfully curated mood-board, where tranquility meets practicality. Soft, soothing colors invite you to explore without distractions, while intuitive elements are placed for easy navigation. Gentle, tactile buttons guide your journey, complemented by clear and lighthearted copywriting that adds a touch of fun to your experience. Augmented Reality (AR) takes restroom-finding to the next level, making it visually engaging, and our expressive illustrations tell the story of convenience and inclusivity. With PeezyFind, finding a restroom isn't just about functionality; it's about enjoying the journey with style and ease.

The initial concept focused on our protagonist's journey to the big city.

The big city that holds the opportunities for our main character.

The main character's first time in an industrial kitchen.