Overview

In preparation for the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, Blue Cross Blue Shield had to adjust its Blue Access for Members (BAM) portal to accommodate thousands of new members. Important features of the member portal, like accessing a proof of coverage letter needed to be streamlined to be more user-friendly, as well as automated so that new members would not flood BCBS with support calls.

Process

I consulted with both business analysts and the design team to clarify requirements for the proof of coverage letter and a new feature that gives members access to a transcript of an initial health interview that they complete after enrollment. After requirements were clarified, I designed a series of wireframes that I iterated on based on feedback of the design- and business-analyst stakeholders.

Solution

I produced final wireframes that were used to roll out both the enhanced proof-of-coverage letter feature, and the new medfile (enrollment health interview) feature. Both of these features are now live on the Blue Access for Members portal.

View Proof of Coverage Wireframes (PDF)

View Medfile Wireframes (PDF)

Overview

Portugal Telecom (known as PT in Portugal), the largest and oldest telecom company in Portugal, has many different brands and identities. In order to manage services within each PT division, business customers must log into a separate website for each one. Our goal was to provide a one-stop hub for PT customers to access all of their services, and to provide a singular identity for all of PT’s company sub-divisions.

Process

User Research

After meeting with the client to agree on the focus of the project, we began the user research phase of the project. We used a combination of methods like contextual inquiries and retrospective walkthroughs, and less frequently, MakeTools and cultural probes.

We conducted research with a total of 21 users in small, medium, and large companies in Madeira. In the contextual inquiries and retrospective walkthroughs, we focused on how participants manage their telecom services. In order to identify the most common PT client concerns, we gave cultural probes to PT client managers (sales agents who also have customer service duties) and asked them to note the nature of each client call they received over a 2-week period.

Synthesis

After finishing user research we began to consolidate our data. This involved extracting observations, breakdowns, and insights from the individual work models we had made for each contextual inquiry / interview we had conducted, and sorting our findings into an affinity diagram. We also made a consolidated model in order to generalize our findings from each individual work model from each interview. Condensing our data allowed us to see important patterns in how businesses manage telecom services.

Findings

Our research revealed that all sizes of companies want to be able to check their bills and usage — even before the end of the billing period — in order to prevent surprise charges. Large businesses rely heavily on client managers and often overwhelm them with routine requests, like checking the details of a contract or checking on employee usage. Companies also want to be able to customize both their services and the way they manage services to fit the size of the company and the amount and type of services the company has.

Concept Development

In order to come up with a solution that would be valuable to both PT and its enterprise customers, it was important to consider both the user and business needs. In creating a portal for business customers, PT hoped to reduce calls to its call center and to its client managers. Many participants we interviewed hoped to take care of routine task like changing a plan, reporting a technical problem, or checking contract details without calling a client manager or the call center.

Concepts

Our consideration of user and business needs led us to develop 3 concepts of client-PT interaction that would reduce calls to PT:

• Self-Management: Users manage and monitor services by themselves.
• Partnership: In order to make communication more efficient, PT provides a context for a client’s call, like a circuit number or a ticket number.
• PT Initiative: PT pre-empts a client’s call by alerting the client about bills or technical failures.

User Testing

The team conducted 3 rounds of user testing with a total of 15 participants. The team used each successive round’s feedback to further iterate on our prototype. In the first round of user testing, the team used low-fidelity sketches. Users were presented with sketches of four different navigations and asked to perform a list of tasks. The goal was to discover the user’s mental model for completing the tasks and which navigation style they preferred. Based on user feedback the team merged the best qualities of the four navigations and proceeded to a higher fidelity.

In the second round of user testing we used keynote to make interactive PDFs of our screens, which were then loaded onto the iPad. This allowed users to interact with prototype (via touch-based gestures) in the same way they would interact with the final application. The goal of this round was to gather further information on how users accomplish telecom management tasks and how task structure in our app may differ from a user’s preferred or usual method of completing tasks.

The third and final round of user testing marked the rollout of the functional prototype. In this round, the fully designed app was coded in Objective C and loaded onto the iPad. The goal of this round was to fine-tune the interaction details, and see how users responded to the complete look and feel of the application.

Final Interface

Features

Flattened information hierarchy

The home page provides one-tap access to all of the most important functions of the portal, a visualization of company-wide usage, the status of all requests, a list of all company services, current and upcoming bills, and buttons to make new requests for services or repairs.

Intuitive Design Metaphors

Different company services are represented by folder icons, which reference real physical folders often used by telecom managers to organize documents.

Scalability and Flexibility

The name, number, and categorization of folders are customizable depending on the number and type of services a company has.

Immediate Feedback on Request Status

On the front page users can see the status and progress of all requests they have made to PT.

All of these features serve the design goal of reducing the amount of calls that business customers need to make to PT client managers or the customer support line.

 

Overview

As labor costs increase for orchards, growers are looking for ways to cut expenses without compromising quality of the harvest. One way to to reduce labor costs is to introduce automation into the harvesting process. Automation already plays a large role in the harvest of produce in Europe, and is being introduced into United States orchards in states like Washington and Pennsylvania.

Our client was a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon who are working on a project called Comprehensive Automation for Specialty Crops (CASC). They are developing a self-steering harvesting platform, called an automated prime mover (APM), that could provide a cheaper alternative to the larger, more expensive harvesting platforms used in Europe. Our group was charged with designing a control panel for the APM.

The machine the researchers had designed was a simple Toro golf cart that had been fitted with a platform that moves up and down to allow workers to harvest fruit at different levels of an apple tree. This cart is programmed with a sensor that allows it to sense its position in the orchard row and steer itself. The APM was in need of a clear, intuitive control panel and interface that would require minimal effort for workers to operate.

Process

Focus Setting

Our group began the design process by meeting with the client, getting an overview of the project, and conducting an affinity diagramming session to tease out the salient issues stakeholders face. From the diagramming session our group developed three areas of focus: understand external factors that affect the harvesting process, understand worker demographics and interactions that affect the harvesting process, and understand the manual and automated operations of pruning, thinning, and harvesting.

Gathering Data

We then arranged our first contextual inquiry at Penn State Fruit Research and Extension Center’s (FREC) research orchard in Biglerville, Pennsylvania. In this contextual inquiry we were able to see the N. Blosi harvesting platform on which the Toro automated prime mover was modeled. We also gained insight into how workers conduct pruning, thinning, and harvesting operations while operating the N. Blosi.

Next, we conducted a second contextual inquiry at a traditional orchard. Workers in this orchard use ladders to move up and down the tree and harvest apples. This contextual inquiry helped us understand the physical strain that traditional harvesting operations can put on workers, and which parts of the harvesting process could be made easier with automation.

Consolidation

After we finished conducting contextual inquiries, we began to consolidate our data to see patterns in the work flow, task sequence, and culture of the orchards. We represented this consolidation of data in models noted the breakdowns in task sequence, work flow, and communication.

Some of the most important breakdowns were:

• the controls on the N. Blosi give little indication of their function and provide no feedback about the status of the machine
• the worker experiences role strain when expected to steer a machine and pick apples at the same time
• workers sometimes have trouble deciding on a speed that accommodates different picking paces
• it is difficult for workers to see which way the wheels on the machine are turned, which makes workers likely to move the N. Blosi in an unexpected direction

Designing from Data

The consolidated data and the breakdowns we discovered provided inspiration a visioning session. The ideas we came up with provided the basis for a low-fidelity prototype. We addressed the wheel position feedback breakdown by providing a display of the machine’s current wheel position. In order to facilitate agreement and productive conversation about vehicle speed, we display the speed prominently on the interface. There is also a voice command system that frees workers to focus on picking fruit and not on driving the machine.

User Testing and Further Design Iterations

We brought this prototype to Soergel orchard to do a think-aloud test on 3 workers. The major problems were confusion about how to use our joystick to move the vehicle forward, confusion about how to use our system of voice commands. Workers we tested were happy with our controls and feedback for platform height, as well as with the joystick’s indication of automatic driving mode.

With the feedback and data we gathered from the think-aloud test, we wrote UARs (usability aspect reports) on the critical incidents that occurred with each user. We rated each incident as minor to severe. These reports guided us in selecting aspects of our design to modify or eliminate.

Once we finished the second iteration of our prototype, we brought it to test with workers at the Biglerville Orchard. We built the interface prototype in Flex, and augmented it with physical steering and speed controls. At the orchard, we conducted a Wizard-of-Oz style user test. This test allows users to interact with the controls and interface, but members of our team actually controlled the changes in the interface and the position and speed of the N. Blosi platform.

Final Design

Overall, workers were pleased with the final interface and controls. One of the main problems we noted was the visibility of our interface in sunlight. Workers had difficulty seeing the interface display so it was hard for them to see the visual feedback that resulted from their use of the manual controls. The correct way to extend the sides of the platform was also not obvious to workers. On the other hand, workers found that use of the joystick control was clear and intuitive, our voice commands were easy to use, and switching to reverse gear was logical and natural.

After our final user test we presented our findings to our client. He was impressed with our final product and has now requested that another group of students further develop our design and prepare it for implementation on the automated prime mover.

Overview

Madeira is a volcanic island with a rugged and challenging topography. Though the capital city, Funchal, has a bus system, most residents rely on a car to traverse the steep inclines and declines that are common and characteristic of the island. In an age of climate change and high fuel prices, how can Funchal transition to a more sustainable transportation system, and thus lower emissions of harmful greenhouse gases?

The CIVITAS MIMOSA (Making Innovation in Mobility and Sustainable Actions) initiative, a project co-financed by the European Union, sponsors empirically-based experimental initiatives that have the goal of promoting sustainable urban mobility. Funchal is one of the five cities in the European Union that is participating in this project.

Our goal was to design a new service that would further promote the use of sustainable transportation in Funchal, while reducing traffic congestion and the emission of greenhouse gases. After designing our service, we presented our proposal to stakeholders from CIVITAS MIMOSA and the Câmara Municipal do Funchal (Funchal City Hall).

The following video demonstrates our final bike plan for Funchal.

Process

In order to understand Funchal’s potential for a bike program, and the existing state of bicycle use and infrastructure, we did the following:

• Background research of other bike programs — mostly those in hilly cities.
• Observed bicyclists to get a sense of who is riding and when they are riding
• Interviewed experts in sustainable transportation planning
• Rented bikes and rode on a bike path in Funchal

Synthesis

No one we surveyed said they would commute by bicycle with the current infrastructure. The main concerns that discouraged people from riding a bicycle are safety of bicycling, the comfort during the trip, and the time it takes to commute by bike.

The background research we conducted led us to some novel design solutions that other cities employed to make bicycling accessible and desirable. The hilly city of Trondheim, Norway, constructed a bike lift (much like a ski rope tow) that a bicyclist can ride up a steep hill in the city. This would later become an important feature of our bike plan.

In order to visualize who would be affected by and invested in a sustainable transportation plan, we made a stakeholder map.

After defining the pool of stakeholders, we further refined our focus by consolidating our user research data into personas.

Concepts

Using the service design framework and methodology, we came up with the following models and documents that articulated our vision for increasing the frequency and ease of bicycle commuting:

Customer Journeys showing the various paths customers could take to interact with different points of our service.

Service Blueprints diagramming the nature and stages of the service interaction, including the backstage processes not visible to the customer.

Cost-Benefit Matrix to evaluate the feasibility and value of implementation of various features of our service plan.

Stages of Implementation (below) show roadmaps for rollout of our plan.

Validation and Iteration

In order to empathize further with our service’s potential users, we conducted several service enactments to understand and further refine the customer experience. After iterating based on our service enactments, we then went to experts to validate our ideas.

From our expert interviews, we came away with the following key recommendations:

• Make electric bicycles a key component of our plan. Electric bicycles will make the extreme inclines less daunting.
• Put buses on the radial routes and connect them to electric bike stations.
• Hold public events like Sunday street closings to increase awareness of bicycles and invite participation from more people.
• Start with basic infrastructure (bike lanes) and work on getting people into the habit of bicycling before proposing more elaborate infrastructure (like bike lifts).

Prototyping

To communicate and promote our ideas to a wider audience, we made a video that shows how our target customers would use our service. Using a stop-motion video, we portrayed how our personas Paula (played by me) and Orlando (played by José Rodrigues) participate in our proposed bike plan for Funchal.

Key Features of our plan include:

Attract and orient cyclists with

• Bike-specific traffic signals and signage
• Painted bike Lanes on roads
• Isolated bike paths
• Bike racks at shopping centers

Invite cyclists to interact with

• Bike lifts on major inclines
• Electric and conventional bike rentals
• Special high-capacity bike-friendly buses

Retain cyclists and advocate for increased participation with

• Sunday bike events (like Sunday street closings)
• Introduction of a smart card (EcoFX card)
• Rewards for employees who commute
• Motivational displays for bike commuters

In June 2011, the team presented the final plan to stakeholders from the Câmara Municipal do Funchal and Lógica.

Overview

Moira Jane is an entrepreneur who specializes in selling vintage clothing and collectibles. She has traditionally sold her wares on e-bay and in person at antique markets. When she wanted to test the market for her goods on Etsy.com, she approached me for some branding and design help, specifically for her Etsy banner.

Process

I have known Moira Jane since we were both 4 years old, so I already had some idea of what the character of her brand should be. Moira Jane is into the rockabilly / pinup genre so I chose to design around a photo of a rockabilly lady, who looks quite like Moira Jane herself. I used this photo to determine the overall color scheme of the Moira Jane banner, which has a jaunty, drag racin’, bright-red lipstick kind of feel.

Solution

The banner conveys an old-fashioned, yet modern sensibility and is a seamless extension of Moira Jane’s brand.

I created the original art (in Illustrator) that I used in this business card concept.

Results

Since Moira Jane’s new banner went live, her Etsy sales increased 2100% (went from 0 to 21) in the span of a couple months. Etsy is a fairly saturated market, so this increase in sales is quite noteworthy.

Overview

The island of Madeira is home to many dogs — and a sizable portion of these animals have been abandoned, are lost, or have always lived on the street. Stray dogs roam the streets, sometimes in packs, and there is no way to know the history or temperament of each dog. In most places on the island, stray dogs are a common sight. Even the University of Madeira had a pack of stray dogs that would settle in various places around the campus. Some workers at the University reported almost being attacked dog packs.

Process

After identifying the problem space, I clarified design goals. How can the island keep better track of its stray dog population and keep the community safe from hostile dogs and dog packs? How can crowdsourcing be used to get lost dogs back to owners? And, how can animal control officials better control the stray dog population by monitoring which dogs are spayed or neutered?

Solution

DogTracker is a mobile application that uses long-range RFID scanning to identify and geotag microchipped stray dogs. Dogs who are not microchipped can be photographed, location-tagged, and entered into a database anyone with the DogTracker application. This way, the general population and animal control officials can track the movements of the island’s dog population, avoid dog packs, help control the stray dog population, and help reunite lost pets with their owners.

Features

• Long-range RFID scanning to identify microchipped stray dogs
• Crowd sourced reports of stray dogs
• Easy photo and text reporting of stray dogs
• Crowd-sourced maps of stray dogs
• Database of all reported stray dogs, with matching of reports of unchipped dogs

For a final project in my Communication Design Fundamentals course, each student designed a recipe and submitted it to the class. We then decided on our own cookbook themes and altered all the recipes to fit with the themes of our books. I chose the theme of sustainable ingredient choices, and I included information in the book about approaches to green eating.

I chose bright colors and a somewhat playful title font to portray sustainable eating as an exciting and fresh life choice. The bright color scheme also complemented the photos of the desserts. To add to the appeal of sustainable eating, I also built up a theme of barns, cows, chickens, and natural scenes on the divider pages and some of the initial pages. These images convey that sustainable eating means helping the earth by eating food that is fresh, and in its more natural, unprocessed form.

Overview

The Arte de Portas Abertas (Open Doors Art) is a public art project centered in the Zona Velha (Old Town) neighborhood of Funchal. The goal of the project is to revitalize the Zona Velha by creating art on the doors of both abandoned buildings and existing businesses and residences. Arte de Portas Abertas also aims to open up the island to more dialog and events related to arts and culture. From December 2011 – February 2012 I painted door number 27 on the warehouse of Bar As Escadas. I depicted a stray dog, Speedy, who has been a fixture on Rua Santa Maria (Santa Maria Road) for over 10 years. Read more on my art blog about my experience painting the door.