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- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
Description
The quality of user interface designs largely depends on the aptitude of the designer. The ability to generate mental abstract models and characterize a target user audience helps greatly when conceiving a design. The dry cleaning point-of-sale industry lacks quality user interface designs. These impaired interfaces were compared with textbook design techniques to discover how applicable published interface design concepts are in practice. Four variations of a software package were deployed to end users. Each variation contained different design techniques. Surveyed users responded positively to interface design practices that were consistent and easy to learn. This followed textbook expectations. Users however responded poorly to customization options, an important feature according to textbook material. The study made conservative changes to the four interface variations provided to end-users. A more liberal approach may have yielded additional results.
ContributorsSmith, Andrew David (Author) / Nakamura, Mutsumi (Thesis director) / Gottesman, Aaron (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
I analyzed a non-profit's educational content website called SolarSPELL and proposed to redesign its interface. SolarSPELL is a solar-powered, offline site that can be accessed without wifi. It looks and behaves exactly like a real website. SolarSPELL is used by children and community members in developing countries across the world, including Africa and the Pacific Islands. The original site was not intuitive or easy to use, which deterred users with low technical literacy, lowering its effectiveness and defeating its purpose of providing educational materials to schools in the community, because users were less likely to use it to access educational content. The website was not responsive, meaning that it did not resize well to fit tablet and mobile devices. I redesigned the site's UX based on user feedback and expert advice to create wireframes that improved the site's layout and user flow to make it more intuitive. I pulled user comments from past surveys on the site and designed solutions to each of the user's complaints. I implemented a filter system and a universal search bar to improve the process of finding specific pieces of content. I designed prototypes using Adobe Illustrator to create the visual side of the interface. I designed my wireframes and prototypes with responsiveness in mind, creating versions for desktop, mobile and tablet. I also illustrated banners for the East Africa and Native American versions of the site, featuring landscape and wildlife from the respective regions. This interface redesign will be coded into a working site and distributed to communities around the world.
ContributorsThielen, Bethany Meishal (Author) / Hosman, Laura (Thesis director) / Ralston, Laurel (Committee member) / College of Integrative Sciences and Arts (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
The software element of home and small business networking solutions has failed to keep pace with annual development of newer and faster hardware. The software running on these devices is an afterthought, oftentimes equipped with minimal features, an obtuse user interface, or both. At the same time, this past year has seen the rise of smart home assistants that represent the next step in human-computer interaction with their advanced use of natural language processing. This project seeks to quell the issues with the former by exploring a possible fusion of a powerful, feature-rich software-defined networking stack and the incredible natural language processing tools of smart home assistants. To accomplish these ends, a piece of software was developed to leverage the powerful natural language processing capabilities of one such smart home assistant, the Amazon Echo. On one end, this software interacts with Amazon Web Services to retrieve information about a user's speech patterns and key information contained in their speech. On the other end, the software joins that information with its previous session state to intelligently translate speech into a series of commands for the separate components of a networking stack. The software developed for this project empowers a user to quickly make changes to several facets of their networking gear or acquire information about it with just their language \u2014 no terminals, java applets, or web configuration interfaces needed, thus circumventing clunky UI's or jumping from shell to shell. It is the author's hope that showing how networking equipment can be configured in this innovative way will draw more attention to the current failings of networking equipment and inspire a new series of intuitive user interfaces.
ContributorsHermens, Ryan Joseph (Author) / Meuth, Ryan (Thesis director) / Burger, Kevin (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
What is a habit, anyway? As it turns out, habits, both good and bad, are huge drivers of the long term direction of an individual’s life. We spend around 45% of our time on habitual behavior, or automatic actions--actions that slip under the radar of normal conscious decision-making processes. Habits are a way for the human brain to conserve energy by reacting in the same way to certain circumstances that generated positive outcomes in the past.
The habit loop underlies this whole process. First, someone has a craving--food, happiness, stress relief, anything. Next, they experience a cue in the environment--a sight, sound, smell, or piece of information that prompts them to act. Then they perform the routine, which is the most visible part of a habit. Finally, they are rewarded, whether the reward is good for them in the long run or not. We perform habits all the time without realizing it, so having even slightly more awareness and control of our habits can have a disproportionate benefit for our personal improvement.
In its earliest iterations, “habit trackers” were paper tools for measuring and motivating daily progress. Many competitors are still paper, like journals and calendars. Others are apps with the same functionality. In my competitive analysis, I chose to focus on competitors that included a behavioral change component along with habit tracking.
The habit loop underlies this whole process. First, someone has a craving--food, happiness, stress relief, anything. Next, they experience a cue in the environment--a sight, sound, smell, or piece of information that prompts them to act. Then they perform the routine, which is the most visible part of a habit. Finally, they are rewarded, whether the reward is good for them in the long run or not. We perform habits all the time without realizing it, so having even slightly more awareness and control of our habits can have a disproportionate benefit for our personal improvement.
In its earliest iterations, “habit trackers” were paper tools for measuring and motivating daily progress. Many competitors are still paper, like journals and calendars. Others are apps with the same functionality. In my competitive analysis, I chose to focus on competitors that included a behavioral change component along with habit tracking.
ContributorsLewis, Catharine Ruby (Author) / Shin, Dosun (Thesis director) / Feil, Magnus (Committee member) / The Design School (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05