Evaluation of BreastCancer.org

Client: Foraker Design; Winter 2006

SI622 "Evaluation of Systems and Services"
Suzanne Chapman, Olga Khroustaleva, Chris Korintus, Tracey Hughes

Breastcancer.org is an online portal that provides thorough trustworthy information for people who have questions about breast cancer. The audience of the website includes women diagnosed with breast cancer, their family members and friends, medical professionals, as well as women who would like to learn more about breast cancer but do not have personal involvement with the disease.

During the course of a semester our team used seven different techniques to evaluate usability, functionality and aesthetics of breastcancer.org: personas, generalized transition network, comparative evaluation, survey, heuristic evaluation, usability evaluation, and visual analysis. These methods are complementary to each other: we applied results gained from techniques used early in the semester to guiding our decisions in later assignments.

"Being There" in the 21st Century

Client: Motorola Labs; Fall 2005

SI501 "Use of Information"
Olga Khroustaleva, Chris Korintus, M. Ricah Marquez, Julie Shadford

Motorola would like to launch a new service for mobile devices that would make people feel more connected and wanted to discover what types of content affect the feeling of "connectedness." Essentially, the research question for our team was: "How can you conjure presence through technological means?"

To answer this question we performed an observational study followed by a series of in-depth interviews of mobile device users. The data collected during the interviews was analyzed with the help of affinity diagrams and presented to the client to facilitate their brain-storming and design processes.

ThoughtBubbles

Client: School of Information; Fall 2005

SI649 "Information Visualization"
Amy Anderson, Eric Frierson, Sylvie Khajuria, Olga Khroustaleva, Nick Senske, James Sweeney

Information Visualization course provides techniques and strategies for creating interactive visualizations of complex data. As a final project for this class our team developed prototypes of an interactive visualization tool for the School of Information Event Planning team. We've employed user-centered design approach throughout the whole design process. To ensure that the final product fit the goals of our users we had several iterations of design and testing of prototypes.

Peony Garden

Client: Nichols Arboretum; Fall 2005

SI504 "Collections and Social Systems"

Peony Garden at the Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor is comprised of about 400 plants. It is one of the most important peony collections of early 19th to early 20th-century cultivars in North America. Researching this collection and its development throughout the years was a fascinating project requiring a certain amount of almost detective exploration of archival materials. I worked with the archives to follow the history of the Garden and analyze how its purpose and interaction with social systems changed throughout the years.

Color Saturation and Advertising

Winter 2005

SI557 "Visual Persuasion"
Patrick Austin, Mario Baumann, Mark Joseph, Olga Khroustaleva

For this project our team developed an experiment to see effects of color saturation on people's perception of print ads. The main goal of our study was to prove existence of positive correlation between levels of color saturation in print advertisement and feelings of pleasure, arousal and dominance that the ads elicits in viewers.

After performing extensive literature review, we created a study that used Pleasure - Arousal - Dominance model proposed by Albert Mehrabian. Our subjects were given three ads, each either in its original color saturation or in a desaturated state, and were asked to rate each ad using computer-based PAD scales. Our hypothesis was that our participants would give higher scores on pleasure and arousal when viewing highly saturated ads in their original saturation, but have a lower dominance score.