PROJECTS

Chillennium Game Jam

Creating the World's Largest Student Directed Game Jam.
  • ​Organized and set goals for team members, onsite events, volunteers and overall scheduling.
  • Collaborated with directors to establish organization goals, milestones, quality standards, and role responsibilities.
  • Documented meeting tasks and trade-offs based on organizations priorities.
  • Organized advertising, website, and participant outreach.
  • Assisted with catering, budgeting, prizes, and trophies.
Learned Lessons
Chillennium was a challenge of how to grow something from nothing. During these three years, I learned a lot about leadership and what it means to collaborate as a team.
  • Open and active communication is invaluable to progressing a project.
  • Road-maps are pertinent for success. The team needs to know what the short and long term goals are.
  • Having a healthy welcoming team environment encourages people to work harder together.
  • It's important to take time and mentor those under you. Encouraging growth from within and assigning tasks that allow your members to grow gives the organization longevity even after you are gone.
  • Nothing will ever go smoothly, be prepared for bumps along the road.
  • There are trade-offs in everything, create your goals for each year and have a backlog of additional perks.
  • Document everything so that you can come back to it. We are not computers and are unable to remember every single thing. Document your process, contacts, struggles and solutions for moving forward to the following year. The next team to take the reigns will appreciate how detailed you are in documenting.
  • Branding makes a large difference in how serious your audience takes you.
  • Follow up with everyone, your organization, participants, partnerships, sponsors, mentors, department, and university.


Website Redesign

Redesigning the Department of Visualization Website.
  • Conducted user and market research.
  • Identified user pain points within current website design.
  • Designed features solving user pain points.
  • Prototype, built, and tested proposed website redesign.
  • Keep thorough documentation of user research, market research, proposed solutions, design decisions, how this aligns with the departments goal.
Lessons Learned
  • ​Know your market. This is one of the biggest things I learned while working on this project. Researching the competitors in your field and understanding how closely related they are to you and how they are presenting themselves. Being able to evaluate your company and how they are presented digitally online is crucial to anything visual based. It's also important to talk with your stakeholders about what makes you unique and different from everyone else? And in what ways are we going to show this to our audience?
  • A pretty website does not solve your user problems. During the process of evaluating the Visualization Department website I noticed there were pain points the department did not see. The way certain pages were worded or where information was placed online, made it confusing to the user. An example of this is how to apply to the graduate program. Important information was spread across three separate pages that were difficult to get to if you didn't know where it was. Being able to address these concerns and present that the website does not only need a visual update but also a complete restructure of how content is displayed and located on the website was very important.
  • Always meet with your stakeholders. For a time I was unable to update our stakeholders on the progress of the website. This ended up leading to poor communication down the line and people becoming confused with what stage the website was at. Always have consistent meetings to keep everyone on the same page.
  • A team. Throughout this project I worked independently through the research, data analysis, design, prototyping, and development stages. Having a team would have allowed for an even better end product and for a quicker turnaround than independently working. It would have allowed people to solely be focused on their own skills while bringing their different perspectives into the conversation. What I enjoyed most was receiving feedback on my work from others. More collaboration on this project would have taken it to the next level.
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Marooned Mobile App

Navigating and Parking on Texas A&M University Campus.
  • Gathered user data through interviews and surveys.
  • Analyzed data identifying personas and scenarios.
  • Designed and prototypes mobile app.
  • User tested mobile app design.
Lessons Learned
​The mobile app for Texas A&M University was the first design challenge I had for interaction design. It was my introduction to designing for a user and thinking about the users experience. Throughout this process I learned a vast amount about the user design process. If I were to list everything that would make a very long list for my lessons learned. For this project, I will be listing the main lessons that I hold dear to me that I try to incorporate into my everyday work.
  • Data is your friend. We can assume whatever we want will solve a problem, but without knowing truly where the problem originates from you're just slapping a band-aid on an infected wound. I always look for a way to use data to assist me in my decision making. I want to know what the real problem is to be able to make informed decisions on how we can take actions to address it. Sometimes that may mean overhauling something entirely or it means we are going to make adjustments to the existing product and start solving the high priority tasks first, then over time we can address the lower priority tasks that over time we will have a more robust product. Additionally, this helps when you are creating something brand new. Take advantage of your data through an iterative process where engineering, design, and product management work as a team to create a product that aligns with the company's goals.
  • Get to know your audience. If you do not know who you are creating for, how can you be successful? Everyone is unique, that is what makes us all interesting as individuals. The audience you create for is interesting and unique in their own way. Get to know them, what motivates them, what frustrates them, their pain points. Understand who your audience is.
  • Trade-offs, there is more than one way to solve your problem. This is true in almost everything, you can use the most expensive or time consuming route to solve your problem but is that what you have available? Or, does it align with your company’s goals? Weighing the options of the resources and time you have available may change how you solve a problem. Is the solution only meant to be temporary or be for longevity? How high of a priority is it? Is your team working on other higher priority projects? Understanding the trade-offs to your decisions and communicating with the team about what is possible and unrealistic needs to happen. This may begin with having conversations with design and engineering to understand their limitations.
  • Love whiteboards and post-it notes. Whenever you need to lay everything out, start writing and drawing. Organize your thoughts on the board and have team discussions about different categories and what ideas fall under them. Plan out the timeline of events of what needs to happen and organizing your priority list.
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User Behavior in VR

Evaluating Fatigue when reading text in Head-Mounted Displays.
  • ​Plan and conduct user testing.
  • Gathered user data through interviews, surveys and observation.
  • Analyzed data identifying user pain points.
  • Based on data-analysis created a solution to user fatigue.
Lessons Learned
  • User testing takes time. When gathering behavioral data you need to be patient and not rush. The best way to obtain the information you need is by spending time upfront before user testing and asking yourself, what data do I need to answer my question? What is the real question I am asking? This will assist you from running studies that are irrelevant to your work and allows you to focus specifically on what you are trying to solve.
  • Just because it's tried and true, does not mean it is the best solution. The interesting find in my research was that users were showing signs of fatigue even with positions that most individuals would assume was non-fatiguing. However, after a certain amount of time users started to show signs of fatigue. The "best" solution for the interface was a combination of two placements (hand and world space) something that was only discovered through user testing and iteration.
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THE EFFECTS OF REFERENCE FRAMES ON 3D MENUS IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT
​The emergence of affordable Head Mounted Displays (HMD) means Virtual Reality (VR) systems are now available to wider audiences. Other than the key target audience, gamers, groups as diverse as oil and gas industries, medical, military, entertainment and education have created demand for effective Virtual Environments (VE). To be effective certain VE's need to properly convey textual information. This is done using 3D menus. It is very important these menus are displayed in an ergonomic manner and do not obstruct important content. The study collected measures of user experience, comfort and memory recall. The study found that reference frames for 3D menus presenting textual information do not influence user experience or memory recall. However, there was a significant difference in user behavior between the reference frames, which has implications for repeated stress injury.
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ARTé

Creating Educational Art History Games for College Students.
  • Collaborate with Subject Matter Expert and Instructional Designers for learning objectives.
  • Create overarching game structure and concepts.
  • Paper prototype ideas and user test.
  • Collaborate with artists and engineers.
  • Create educational mini games pertaining to visual literacy in Art History. 
Lessons Learned
  • Clean and clear documentation. As a game designer I worked closely with the programmers on our team. In the beginning, I was not detailed enough when documenting that I was unsure of how the mini game that I created functioned. This was a very valuable lesson because the programmer working alongside me would point out these confusing points. They would question areas I had not previously thought about. I greatly appreciated the team effort and collaboration, as it was a way for me to get better at documenting and also being able to get inside the head of a programmer and their thought process. Understanding who you are working with and the way they think is pertinent to communicating effectively.
  • Communication and setting concise objectives. When creating an educational game there are multiple learning objectives that must be met. When I came on board these objectives were very broad and not specific which meant there was a lot for us to cover when designing the game. By getting to know our Subject Matter Experts I was able to understand what they were wanting to teach, pinpointing only a few learning objectives out of the many that we had. These conversations lead us to redefining what learning objectives we would be teaching in the game. The original 10 were broken down into 50 individual objectives, which was way beyond our scope for the project. However, by having these conversations with our Subject Matter Experts we learned more about what they teach and why it's important to teach them in a certain way. Allowing for us, as designers, to design a game that was actually teaching what Art History Professors wanted instead of being stretched very thin and missing the learning objectives. Communicating was valuable for us to lead the project in the right direction, without consulting with our Subject Matter Experts we would have gone down a much more rigorous road.

Austin, TX