User Interaction Portfolio

I have over 10 years experience with User Interaction Design. I first studied User Interaction Design in early college in my Bachelor’s program and immediately took interest. I decided to make this the focus of my Master’s Degree. RIT offered the Human-Computer Interaction program though the Information Technology curriculum. I took all the courses they offered in this field, passionately devoting my time and attention to each facet of the degree.

My Master’s Thesis, titled "Assessing Interpretability of Visual Symbols" was a User Interaction Design research project which investigated how people understand icons. The technically complex thesis detailed novel discoveries in biology, technology, and interaction design, and compared the data from 299 participants who evaluated icons of varied colors and forms. The full thesis is available here.

After graduation, I taught this subject as an Adjunct Professor in information technology courses and even had the pleasure of teaching Human Computer Interaction to undergraduates. I also formed my own business, Amalgam Web and Media, which produces multimedia and websites which are clear and intuitive. I also produced heuristic evaluations for clients with existing products.

In August of 2012 through July of 2013, I served as a User Interaction Designer with Carestream Health, designing touch screen controls for x-ray and digital radiography systems. I created new workflows, visuals, written instruction, and interaction strategies for CR and DR, ImageSuite, DirectView, Evolution, Revolution, PACS, Web PACS, online tools, and retrofit systems, among other Carestream products. I designed new strategies for moving from a single-touch or mouse-controlled environment to a multi-touch approach with gesture recognition. Our goal was to maintain familiarity of previous systems while introducing a novel interaction strategy. Conducting carefully constructed surveys, observing user experiences with our products, researching the competition, and investigating new interaction strategies such as touch-screen technologies, assure that the changes would increase efficiency, minimize user error, and improve the quality of our product. I presented most solutions through heuristic evaluation, tests, prototypes, and documentation.

User Interaction Projects

MOGO: Movies To Go (http://www.bdparker.com/projects/MOGO.pdf) A usability engineering assignment where our team created a video vending service (similar to RedBox). Our goal was to improve the usability of the existing system by identifying problems with the existing technology, recommending improvements, and running iterative usability tests on our new interface. Users agreed our system was an improvement over the existing product. Usability Test of the Deltec Cosmo (http://www.bdparker.com/projects/Insulin_Pump_Study.pdf) This is a usability study completed on the Deltec Cosmo Insulin Pump for a manufacturer. The study involved designing and running usability tests on the product and measuring and analyzing our results. In conclusion, we were able to identify areas of improvement for the system's usability.

User Interaction Research

• Assessing Interpretability of Visual Symbols
• Capstone Preproposal using Eye Tracking as Means to Computer Interaction
• Capstone Preproposal using Eye Tracking as Means to Computer Interaction
• The Mouse and the Metphor
• Designing for the User
• Google and the Internet
• BBCi and the Glass Engine
• Adoption Trends and Innovation Diffusion
• Adopting the iPod
• Increasing Simplicity Through Heuristic Evaluations
• Usability Engineering Lifecycle
• Exploring Brain Controlled Interfaces
• Video Game Interaction