Limeade User Experience
Integrated Agile UX processes into the monthly sprint cycles to hypothesize, validate and reduce risk in design iterations of the product. Facilitated a design and innovation focused culture with user centered processes. Modern, visual, fun user experience with responsive and fluid layout to make incentive programs easy to understand and enjoyable to use. The keyContinue reading “Limeade User Experience”
Dotastic – Fuse Labs
Social to-do list/challenge platform for using peer pressure to get things done. Points, social interactions and photos for a compelling fun experience. Released as an iPhone app (using PhoneGap) and a Windows Phone app. I was the PM on this app and worked with an awesome team including Greg Melander, Flynn Joffray, Nathan Roberton, CraigContinue reading “Dotastic – Fuse Labs”
SOCL Video Parties – Fuse Labs
Connect over shared interests expressed through beautiful post collages that take seconds to create. Managed Video Parties for massive real-time synchronous video watching experiences around shared interests. Worked with an awesome team that included Todd Newman, Stephen Coy and Flynn Joffray. So.Cl was in beta for a year and was finally released publicly in 12/2012. CheckContinue reading “SOCL Video Parties – Fuse Labs”
Docs.com – Fuse Labs
Microsoft Office on the web deeply integrated with Facebook pages and groups with instant personalization and frictionless collaboration. I was the PM on v2 of this project and worked with Andrez Turski and Shelly Farnham and we also authored this ICWSM paper. Docs.com
Bus Defense AR game – Fuse Labs
Location Based Augmented Reality game for serendipitous interactions with fellow commuters. I designed and prototyped this game as an HTML5 mobile app. Worked with Stephen Coy who worked on the Windows Phone version using XNA and Tien Suwandy who built the game backend. You can see an early prototype of the basic game engine here. And the codeContinue reading “Bus Defense AR game – Fuse Labs”
Visualizing Foursquare Checkins across venues
I was curious to see what checkin data looks like when aggregated across multiple venues of the same type. I put together this site which has some pre-configured venue-sets and depending on the URL used, they can either be viewed independently or be compared across multiple ones. https://sameerhalai.com/projects/checkin/venues/aaplstorenearmsft/msftstoreall/
Tweeting Cat Feeder
If you have a cat and have considered an automatic portioning cat feeder then you should consider the Super Feeder. I decided to hack mine to let me see track how much food is being fed to the cat, and how long the cat takes to finish her food. This project uses an arduino basedContinue reading “Tweeting Cat Feeder”
Windows Live Messenger Facebook Chat
I worked on enabling chat integration between Facebook Chat and Windows Live Messenger. This was a massive feat involving lots of stakeholders. I managed the user experience and UI for the project working with a brilliant team that spanned the Windows Live backend and Facebook engineers. We also found elegant solutions for managing privacy implicationsContinue reading “Windows Live Messenger Facebook Chat”
Pedometer visualization with a fish-tank
I worked with Dr. Caroline R. Richardson and Prof. Paul Resnick on a fish-tank visualization of group pedometer counts. The goal was to see the influence of group dynamics on people’s response to being diligent about physical activity. The visualization relied on overall degradation of the fish-tank if most people were doing badly but itContinue reading “Pedometer visualization with a fish-tank”
Social Cars
What would a social experience in cars be like? In this exploration, Jim Laing and I conceptualized an intuitive interface with non-intrusive augmented reality to engage in a social experience with other people in cars around you.
Distributed task game using geocaching
To introduce people to geocaching and to evaluate how well they can perform a sort operation in a situation where no one knew the right answer but everyone was in a position to make a guess. Very interesting reading and fun finding comparing human sorting vs algorithmic sorting complexities. Read more at: https://sameerhalai.com/geocaching/
Activity focused design Board of Regents
The University of Michigan Board of Regents meets several times a year. Development and distribution of information relevant to the meetings is a complex cycle requiring collaboration between all the departments and other entities. We performed observations and ethnographic studies of how the current process occurs, we also studied how other universities perform the sameContinue reading “Activity focused design Board of Regents”
School of Information in Second Life
Establishing and developing a community area in the virtual world of Second Life for the University of Michigan School of Information. That’s me on the left as “SmarxStein”
Usability Study of SI Computing at UoM
Studying the SI Computing website for it’s usability. Performing ethnographic studies, personas and scenarios, heuristic evaluation, comparitive evaluation, lab test, vocabulary analysis. The project files for this can be found here. The final report is still being developed. Other people: Messeret Gebrekistos, Sunny Beach, You Yuanqing. Derek Cooper
World of Warcraft – network visualizations
We spidered tonnes of data to capture a premium snapshot of entire World of Warcraft realms. We were interested in the question: What are the factors that lead to a successful arena team? Is it prior or current guild association? We found that arena teams that do well tend to have members with higher closenessContinue reading “World of Warcraft – network visualizations”
doGooder – a volunteer social network
Winner of the 2nd prize in the Computer Human Interaction (CHI) International Student Design Competition ’08 that was held in Florence, Italy. We developed an HCI solution to combat the problems of homelessness. Our research revealed that one of the ways to have the highest impact on the cause was to help more people getContinue reading “doGooder – a volunteer social network”
TORSC Wizard
Worked with Dr. Gary Olson and Dr. Judy Olson on Theory of Remote Scientific Collaboration. Developing a web-based expert system, the Wizard, for predicting the success of a yet to form collaboration. The Wizard is still under development and an instance of it can be found here Other people: Mark Madrilejo, Sajeev Cherian
!alone (not alone): social gaming at UoM bus stops
Developing a wireless node to be installed on all the University of Michigan Blue Bus Stops for collaborative gaming. Involves design of a collaborative game using a reduced simple interface, audio channels for content distribution and design of a cheap, replacable device with wireless capabilities. It is being designed to work in conjunction with the MagicContinue reading “!alone (not alone): social gaming at UoM bus stops”
Pariivartan – a non-profit
Pariivartan (wayback machine) was a non-profit organization started by my friends and me back in India. It used a network of volunteers to collect old newspapers from houses in different neighborhoods and donated the money generated from recycling them to other organizations and individuals in need.
Micromouse
An autonomous robot that can find it’s way out of a maze. Other people: Zaryab Khan, Waseem Khatri
Redesign of a solar furnace
This was one of my high school projects. Solar furnaces individually move thousands of mirrors to focus on a central focus point. Our assertion was that it’s more expensive to build and maintain such furnaces because of all the moving parts. This was an exploration of a different design where we made the mirrors fixedContinue reading “Redesign of a solar furnace”
