What am I working on now?
My goals for 2017 include diving into User Experience Design. As such, I am designing and building the following projects with a few remarkable student teams.
Graphite: A Mobile-First LMS Solution
Existing Learning Management Systems (LMS) are incredibly unintuitive, especially in mobile environments. Professors are frustrated attempting to manage clunky site architectures, and students have difficulties accessing course materials and grades.
Our team is building Graphite, a mobile LMS solution. Graphite will minimize the difficulties of accessing course information on-the-go.
Graphite is a practical alternative to clunky, hard-to-use LMS systems higher educational institutions already pay for. Graphite’s mobile-first student dashboard encourages students to engage with peers and professors.
As of February, we are completing user research and beginning to prototype the application architecture. We plan to complete the app's UX design and full pitch this semester.
Completion Date: April 2017
Mindful Marketing: Senior Thesis
Can digital designers harness empathetic UI + UX to help users spend time well, while maintaining revenue opportunities for brands and businesses?
Mindful Marketing is an ongoing series of mobile app prototypes of pre-existing popular social networks, starting with Facebook. Mindful Marketing showcases innovative solutions for empathetic UI + UX through fully designed prototypes displayed in an interactive web gallery.
Based upon contemporary tech trends, consumer research and near-future projections, these prototypes are designed to respect the user’s technological agency while increasing self-awareness and intentionality of mobile device use.
The prototypes encourage product designers and marketers to honor their users’ time and utilize ethical and empowering design principles without sacrificing revenue opportunities.
Completion Date: May 2017
Project Research + Development
Team Depolarization: Design for America
This Spring, I am the project manager for Team Depolarization at USC Design for America. My team recognizes the deep divisions between families, friends, neighbors and strangers simply due to political differences. We beg the question: is politics the problem, or are we facing an empathy deficit? Angry rants online and violent protests seem to lack a wider recognition of our innate humanity. After all, as humans we are more alike than different.
We are in the process of interviewing professionals and peers to get to the root of the problem. We will ideate throughout the semester, before coming to a solution. Will it be an app? A unique chatroom? A live event? We will present our findings at the semester's end.
Completion Date: May 2017