The App Development Lab. We help develop apps as part of the Innovation Commons. As entrepreneurs enter the Beehive system, those that need apps get referred to us. The process takes about 6-12 months. In that time, we do the user experience design work and user testing to make development faster and easier. Currently, we have three user experience students and many projects. Here are a few prototypes of things that we are working on...
MyAwayTogether https://www.figma.com/file/nAWbmPQmKMJNAdBeg94SVQ/AwayTogether?node-id=0%3A1
GolfErie https://www.figma.com/file/p00WeCdK0a2tOPKHMAH1tT/Golf-Erie
Pallet Tracker: https://www.figma.com/proto/tB2VNAn272Tv3RUpr6G4fu/Pallet-Tracker?node-id=2%3A3&scaling=scale-down&page-id=0%3A1&starting-point-node-id=2%3A3
Troutwood. Penn State Behrend has many interdisciplinary efforts between different schools. One effort is to support financial literacy in grades 8-12 and beyond. A different organization developed an application to address these concerns and asked us to test it for them. The initial testing resulted in many surprises for us all. Here is the link to the report: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_EiSmNTxum2v1lh-VyJyiDeuVa1sVe1n/view?usp=share_link
The Landing Place. Dr. Chris Shelton and I continued to discuss how Serene could be more helpful to the local communities of uninsured and new Americans who suffer from the stigma surrounding mental health issues. We ideated an app that could educate and provide non-therapeutic relief while suggesting resources and treatment options. Eventually, a clinical psychology graduate student joined the team, Lerato Ramses, and we continue to work on the project. From an HCI standpoint, I wondered how the Rational Actor Perspective (4) and the Technology Acceptance Model (5) would interact with three popular design approaches: 1. Gero's Structure, Behavior and Function model of design; 2. Vicente's Ecological Design; 3. User Centered Design. Would one design model create a prototype that users found to be significantly easier to use, useful (Technology Acceptance Model) and better aligned with their goals (Rational Actor Perspective). This is an ongoing project as we collect user data. Here are the three prototypes:
The Landing Place (MX-Gero's SBF) https://www.figma.com/proto/tB2VNAn272Tv3RUpr6G4fu/Pallet-Tracker?node-id=2%3A3&scaling=scale-down&page-id=0%3A1&starting-point-node-id=2%3A3
The Landing Place (MM- Vicente's Ecological) https://www.figma.com/file/CKc5yMxzSiTPhft50zrVWr/Untitled
The Landing Place (AM- User Centered Design) https://balsamiq.cloud/suvfo20/p3nrxo7
Serene Help. Erie, Pennsylvania is just like the rest of the country, we are suffering from the mental health effects of the pandemic. Dr. Chris Shelton, Dr. Richard Zhao and I wanted to do something to help. This app helps. We organized the funding with the help of Jacob Marsh in the Spring of 2020. Then, over the summer, we created the app with our undergraduate and graduate students. The students take credit for the work, they were the creatives. Erica Juriasingani did the user experience design and research, Antigoni did the content with Dr. Shelton, and Marc Maromonte did the coding. We are very proud as this is the only UX-first development team at Penn State. Here is the webpage for the app https://sites.psu.edu/serene/
Here is where you can find it on the Google Play store https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.cordova.serenehelps
Please note: Serene Help is undergoing an update and isn't currently available through Google Play (December, 2022)
Tampa Bay/University of South Florida. This project began in 2014 with a conversation at CUTR https://www.cutr.usf.edu/ with Sean Barbeau https://medium.com/@sjbarbeau The project quickly expanded to find out if better design would help encourage people to take public transit through a real time transit tracking smart phone app called One Bus Away or OBA https://onebusaway.org/ We helped design the local on campus version of OBA called Mobullity. The Mobullity app told university students when the free campus bus would arrive at their destination. We used ethnographic interviews, ethnographic observations, user testing and heuristic analysis to refine the app and the website. Through user testing we found that people wanted to know times and distances for walking, riding the transit bus, and driving across campus. Here is the website: https://maps.usf.edu/ Github: https://github.com/CUTR-at-USF/usf-mobullity The local version of the app influenced the citywide version of OBA which is available through https://onebusaway.org/ The app serves the transit community by having real time data on bus arrival times and ridership. It also provides data on which routes are the most popular and where passengers search for potential routes. The search for routes feature lets the transit community know where to place future routes, what locations are most requested and how to re-route current transit choices.
We presented the work at the Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics Conference: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1grx-4kxM5mUSK1oGEgN1FS4mtYrpnwgC/view?usp=sharing
Kansas City, Missouri. A conversation with Anthony Luppino led to involvement in the Legal Tech Lab at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. https://www.whatgreatlawschoolsdo.com/2018/05/legal-technology-laboratory/ The lab had several projects connecting different types of legal services to the community through app development. Once the initial idea for the app was created, the development team went to work on the interface.
Plumber's Dilemma- Initially, this was an app to help all contractors navigate city hall's permit process. As we delved deeper, we found that plumbers had the most challenging process. It was so challenging that they would hire an organization JUST to PULL PERMITS from city hall! The project pivoted to accommodate this new information. Weeks of ethnographic interviews, prototyping, and user testing paid off. The project has been a resounding success. The usability report can be found here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xeilIGl0ps7UWJYKAXaBhDZ_v1pV9X1V/view?usp=sharing
Abandon Properties/Parcel Assessment Tool. Many older cities have problematic buildings. Owners leave them vacant, fail to pay the property taxes, essentially abandoning the property to the city. The building may continue to decay, inviting crime and nature to take over. These properties are a challenge to sell and get back on the tax roll. Jim DeLisle took this project on. Through iterative testing, we were able to recommend what was working and what wasn't working in the interface. The Abandon properties project is here https://osf.io/uex2a/ The user testing work is here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VskLQCRo6-bLJrQ1U7QQXmpUCeCWZF9Q/view?usp=sharing
Smart Cities. Many cities are beginning to incorporate sensors in their traffic signals, on their city buildings, in their parking lots, and inside their buildings. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/smart-cities-6-essential-technologies/ These sensors have the capacity to recognize faces and vehicles. It is possible that individuals would want to know when their images are being captured and entered into a database. Professor Eicks from Vermont Law worked closely with us to develop potential interfaces. Here is the project as it has evolved https://www.thelegaltechlab.com/index.php/smart-cities-and-compliance-with-privacy-laws Here is our work https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZnpXBKiO4YcZEyoqPFAkLR4tGqBQWevF/view?usp=sharing
The director of the health department saw an emerging public health crisis in 2016 with a growing HIV and STD transmission rate in Kansas City. He knew that his department offered free condoms and provided them to several other sites as well around the city. It seemed like no one else knew this information. He asked for our help. How could he reach the populations most at risk? We spent the summer doing an ethnographic study and then helping with the website design. User testing followed with iterative changes. The catchy title has helped the distribution. Here is the website http://igotmineinkc.org/ Here is the user report https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KyC7qNddI4pwymNWQQSMM862HWZreZts/view?usp=sharing
Occasionally, groups of developers and researchers will get together and work on a competition. One of these was the Robert Woods Johnson healthcare competition. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CfKkUZ7OBHBuI0L9vpxsryWZfWzpotmR/view?usp=sharing First, we worked on a comprehensive problem statement here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lb7Yl-qPDUkpq-HrE3zRSIB6m3TSYdVS/view?usp=sharing Then, we looked at the health psychology literature to find out why people would not adhere to a medication regimen https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SdQ8rMQYFJ-ioTA8LRSQsfwHI5VVEcz3/view?usp=sharing Then, we did a flow chart of the app https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P5PK_DC5vGzTDHZUqrBFNudKuzGtDo_j/view?usp=sharing
Finally, some prototyping. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v5Qivuahc5QYfxxyMrSHDQMGJ19Lmlk3/view?usp=sharing and https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j-738vggJGDMvS-OOjEJ-PWNem7uyVYC/view?usp=sharing
A local Pennsylvania entrepreneur, Andrew Lang, created an app for students to sell notes to each other as well as professors to sell their notes or upload special content. He wanted to know if students had problems with the app and what types of problems they had. His app can be found here: https://www.omeganotes.com/ The report is here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DCYwwhEElLNdMDjw-5h65bH2E_jkOqvr/view?usp=sharing
Community KC. Kansas City is a city of neighborhoods. Instead of asking where you live, people ask what neighborhood you live in. Some of the neighborhoods are historic preservation districts, others are active in social justice, and others are active in revitalization projects. The city leaders wanted a way to communicate neighborhood resources, projects, and events to other neighborhoods so that their residents could emulate or join in. The nature of the project dictated a specific design, but through user testing, we were able to make some solid recommendations that improved the site. https://www.communitykc.org/
Neighborhood Stat. The neighborhoods like to promote their statistics to write grants to further improve their neighborhood. These neighborhoods needed a portal to access their statistics as well as the statistics for nearby neighborhoods. We needed a map based access point that was easy for all users to use. Here is the link to the report https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lUeItBwrz6DfXLbnauaNtM5CAWSfTqiy/view?usp=sharing
Kansas City IP Broadband Speed test. As Google Fiber was installed throughout the city, people were interested in knowing how fast their internet was. The development team focused on making a customized speed test. Our user testing of the application was here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s8RSrEOU85fOdgHlhI4z4v-KP2qJJtm3/view?usp=sharing