During the fall of 2012 (my sophomore year), I took CS/Psych 3750 (User Interface Design). The class paired up with the Atlanta Beltline to help develop interfaces that emphasized art in the community and safety on the Atlanta Beltline. My team of four students was assigned to make a system that enhanced safety on the Beltline. My group decided to develop two types of interfaces: a mobile app for use off of the Beltline and a physical kiosk for use while on the Beltline trails. Development of both of these was done simultaneously using LucidChart, in order to create a cohesive feel across both platforms.

Over the course of a semester, my group and I used the concepts we learned in class to conduct preliminary user surveys, develop multiple prototypes for both the mobile app and the kiosk, conduct user experience testing, revise our prototypes, and conduct final surveys of user satisfaction with the products we had developed.

As the only person of my team with familiarity conducting empirical user experience testing, I determined the criteria we used to measure success during the demo for the prototypes (number of button clicks and time needed to complete each task) and ran the statistical analysis and interpretation on our data. I spent most of the semester developing the preliminary questionnaires and method for testing the usability of our prototypes, and conducting statistical analysis in SPSS to support our claim that the app we developed was useful to Beltline staff and users alike.

I also contributed to the design of the physical kiosk (color scheme, presence and location of light strips to indicate trail safety status, and button design and placement within the app). I designed the administrator website used to update the information provided by the kiosk as well.

At the end of the semester, we compiled all of our data into a final report and presented our prototypes to the class with our reasoning for why they would be beneficial to the Beltline.

This project is what led me to look into usability research. It gave me the skills to design a product and conduct a usability research experiment, which is not something I got a chance to do in any of my psychology classes.

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