January 20, 2011
Contact Info for Today’s Guests
As promised, here is contact info for todays guest speakers. Feel free to follow up directly. And use the comment space for posting your own contact info and forming groups.
Dan Perkel and Jason Schultz
Paul Waddell
Greg Wolff
Kevin Koy and Sarah van Wart
Kuang Chen
Aekta Shah and Sarah van Wart
Kurtis Heimerl
I’m interested in how we use our devices (phones, laptops) to give and receive feedback. Given how connected we are to one another digitally, it’s insane that we don’t do a better job of using our devices to exchange feedback—and not just feedback when it’s requested, but feedback whenever a user or stakeholder wishes to provide it.
I’m talking feedback that helps people hold institutions accountable.
It’s a really big usability challenge, in my opinion. What mechanisms for giving feedback are simple and attractive enough that they are widely adopted and continually used? How do we aggregate that feedback in a way that is clear and compelling not just to the intended recipients, but to the press—and, ultimately, to one another?
As a person with a public policy background, I obviously care a lot about how we can provide feedback to our political leaders. But feedback is a challenge/opportunity of the digital era that is broader than just politics—and it’s something I’d like to tackle with a broad view.
But to get anything done, we have to start with a manageable piece, and work with the resources we have most readily available. So for this class, I propose that we design a solution for the most readily available population here on campus—students—that helps them give feedback on something they spend a lot of time doing—sitting in class listening to a professor.
There’s already some cool work in this area (for example, where researchers had students use joysticks to tell their professor to “speed up” or “slow down” his teaching based on their interest and understanding of the material—that’s live feedback!). See here:
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~kate/project3.html
I’d like to do something similar to the project above, only build something web- and/or mobile-based so that whatever we build could be scaled and actually have an impact.
Let me know if you’re interested. I’m a first-year Ph.D. student at the I School, and am gpanger at berkeley. Do send me a note if any of the above strikes your fancy.
Cheers,
Galen
I want to work on the Interfaces for Creating and Delivering Mobile Health Information project with Greg Wolff. Please email me (emily @ ischool.berkeley.edu) if you are also interested. Greg and Hesperian are eager to know who all of the team members from Berkeley will be.
Galen — Your idea sounds interesting! One of my former startup’s incubator-mates was working on conference support software with some similar features (real-time feedback for keynote speakers, choosing/queuing Q&A questions, surveying attendees’ experiences, etc). It’d be really cool to build something similar, but free and specifically tailored to an academic context. Will email. 🙂
I’m working on Shreddr – worked on it last semester too, and it’s a great project. If you’re interested, please feel free to get in touch with me – andrea.spillmann [at] gmail [dot] com
(To refresh the memory: Shreddr is a cheap and easy way to digitize data. On the backend, it does that by using OCR that is then verified by people – crowdsourced, insourced, or leveraging the cognitize surplus. We’d be working with the people.)
While working at my former employer, Cityspan (www.cityspan.com) I started a redesign of their product, youthservices.net, which is a web application for after school programs to track and manage attendance. In contrast to most of the other projects, they’re a profitable company that has had a working product for the last 10 – 15 years. However, they’ve never had a dedicated graphic designer work for them and no one has ever worked on improving the usability of the product. This isn’t a simple reskinning, it’s a rethinking of the entire task flow and user experience.
There’s already a large and varied user base whose experiences and frustrations we can focus our improvements on and measure our results against. And there’s a definite need for this project from a user perspective, as the company gets a lot of unnecessary calls regarding how to accomplish basic tasks. The developers would appreciate it as well and implement our work, which would result in our redesign being seen by the thousands of users already using the application.
Email me at jlzych@gmail.com if you’re interested. To view a demo site, go here (all dummy data):
http://www.youthservices.net
Username: ys
Password: guest
I’m currently starting a company called NewGoTos, which is focused on helping people discover new restaurants to try. Unlike services like Yelp, where the user reads reviews from random people, NewGoTos is focused on helping close friends share recommendations. This adds a layer of trust to the recommendations and also makes it more fun for the users.
There are some cool projects that we could work on relating to both the mobile app AND the web-based site (I wasn’t sure if we could work on the website before, but turns out it’s ok). To generally classify NewGoTos, it incorporates heavy components of search, social and local. One unique thing to consider is that I’m currently launching the site, so there will be real content up and we can get feedback from actual users. Many of the users will be from the business school, so they’re pretty accessible.
Website projects: I have a 1st gen website up that I’ve been rolling out to users. There’s still a lot that can be done to assess users’ needs and to evaluate how users interact with the current site. Based on what we discover, we can try out a variety of site re-designs.
Mobile projects: I don’t have any kind of mobile website/app yet, but would like to build one this semester. We’ll be starting from scratch to assess user needs, try out a bunch of prototypes, etc.
For both the web/mobile projects, I will incorporate what we design before the summer, when I will be launching the site more broadly within SF/Berkeley.
If you’re interested, please contact me at bryan_mao@mba.berkeley.edu. Thanks!
Hey everyone,
These ideas sound great!
My idea is for a Web-based Personal Trainer.
I’m sure you know at least one person with a New Year’s Resolution to go to the gym more and lose some weight! But how come it’s so hard to keep at it?
Yes, people can be lazy… but often enough I find a major obstacle is that I’m not sure what exercises I should be doing (or if i do know, then I forget).
here’s my idea in a nutshell:
Based on a user’s individual profile and goal (entered online), this service delivers a tailored exercise regiment schedule and sends daily reminders of what exercises to do (prompting you to do them). As a bonus, each exercise will include visual/audio aides (e.g., YouTube Video) to explain how each exercise is completed. Future work: potentially could also integrate with iphone+Nike workout system.
Email me at mcozzi at ischool dot berkeley dot edu if you’re interested!
Marco
Hi All,
I’m going to do the California climate change project, “Cal-Adapt”, presented by Kevin Koy: http://gif.berkeley.edu/about/research.html.
Please email me if you want to team up.
Chloe
For those of you not at the I School, my email address is chloe_reynolds at ischool dot berkeley dot edu
I’m interested in doing a project on how to present smartphone and browser users with application warnings (e.g., “This app wants access to your location”). If you’re interested in the project my e-mail address is apf at berkeley dot edu.
Hi everyone!
I’m looking for people who wants to work with me in the UMATI project (Crowdsourcing Vending Machine)
I have a background in Industrial Engineering and I know how to use Fireworks to build some prototypes.
You can contact me here: sebastian at ischool dot berkeley dot edu
Last minute call. Would love to have one or two more members for the narratives for education project. Here’s a small description of it:
This project is a system for remixing new media on the web in order to compose rich educational material for distance learning. It is an authoring platform that allows educators to create what we call narratives: a cohesive collection of online resources arranged in a way that allows students to explore a topic along a logically ordered trail rather than from a list of facts or links. To compose a narrative, a curator draws content from openly accessible new media sources, such as YouTube, Flickr, Flat World Knowledge, and Wikipedia. To consume a narrative, a student explores the narrative from one digestible portion of information to another. She can move forward or backward at her own pace, and on occasion take side-trips for a more in-depth look at a particular subject. In this way, the system leverages the ordered narrative structure of books and the dynamic networked nature of online media to create a novel learning artifact.
Contact me at tj@ischool.berkeley.edu if you find this interesting!