User Research Projects

This page includes a sampling of my User Experience Research projects. These projects show my experience with various methods that will be important to my work as a designer.

Cultural Probe

This project involved using a cultural probe in order to learn more about loss from a particular subject. Our subject had recently gone through a divorce, and had been forced to sell his truck and boat. His dog had also recently died.

Our probe was housed inside a small pet carrier, and included activities asking him to reflect on his recent losses. We included workbooks based on the loss of his wife, truck, boat and dog. Our probe was very successful, and our subject offered a lot of information. We were able to learn about how his life had changed since he lost those objects, which he had learned to leave behind (his wife, boat, and truck), and which still affected him (his dog).

Teammates: Jordan Hayes, Pui Mo

My contributions: design of probe activities, subject interview, final document arranging and writing.

Diary Study

This project was a diary study that I completed for a class. The goal was to learn about how the user worked with everyday objects, and create design directions based on that. My subject was a co-worker who was an accomplished guitar player. Through the study I learned more about his day-to-day schedule, and how he interacted with simple artifacts.

Affinity Diagramming

In this project, my teammate Steve Voyk and I took research we had done during a contextual inquiry and used an affinity diagram to organize the concepts and discover design insights and directions. This included sketches and ideation in addition to the analysis.

Methods used:

• Contextual Inquiry
• Affinity Diagramming

Teammate: Steve Voyk

My contributions: subject recruitment, sketching, design ideation, final document arrangement.