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Portfolio

Throughout my professional and academic career, I participated in several projects. The most interesting ones are listed here.

Ingram Micro

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Ingram Micro is the largest wholesale distributor of technology products in the world. The FORTUNE 100 company operates in more than 55 countries. Through its websites, Ingram Micro allows resellers to manage orders and other business operations. Customers can access the Ingram Micro sites to search for items, order products, as well as manage billing, shipping and returns.

The plan for this project was big: to completely redesign the website and replace the 30-plus websites globally with one global template that allowed localization as needed. Ingram Micro's most explicit problem was the country-specific needs. The various country websites were created at different times, by different people so their architectures and layouts were completely different. And while Ingram Micro distributes a wide variety of products, it did not provide an ideal shopping experience due to the websites' limited search capabilities. Ensuring that users could access the company's catalog easily was a fundamental goal for this project.

We developed a new architecture that could be applied consistently by dividing the website into six main sections: Products, Vendors, Services & Support, News & Events, and Become a Reseller (logged-out state) / My Account (logged-in state). We also created an inventory of standard UI elements. This solution allowed the website administrators in each country to control their local content without breaking the new layout's overall structure.

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One of my tasks was to design the initial wireframes for the My Account section. That section included information about orders, invoices and returns. The challenge was to maintain a standard look among the different internal areas, while addressing the backend limitations specific to each area. I divided the main page of those areas into two parts: records search (top) and records listing (bottom). The search included text fields and parameters, clustered into particular groups. The listing, on the other hand, displayed details about records that matched the search terms. Even though orders, invoices and returns used different parameters, all pages ended-up with a standard look. This solution strengthened the impression that they were all sister pages.

For the product search, we recommended purchasing Endeca, a best-in-class, e-commerce technology. We also developed a faceted system to let users filter the catalog according to specific product characteristics. For example, users looking for Microsoft keyboards under $100 could now use the Vendor and the Price facets to filter the results. By allowing users to access product information with less clicks, the faceted search system improved the site experience.

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BookMooch

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Do you know that old book taking space on your shelf? Well, you may find a home for it. BookMooch is a book-swapping website. You can give away books that you don't use anymore, and change them for books that you want to read. The site uses a very simple point system. Every time you give someone a book, you receive one point; and every time you ask for a book that someone else has, you "pay" with one point. The books travel from sender to moocher via regular mail.

We aimed to answer 2 questions in this project: (1) why people use BookMooch and (2) how they use the site. Our objective was to provide a clear picture of the users' goals and habits, in order to help developers improve the overall experience on the site. We were not addressing design at the surface (e.g. images, navigation, links). Instead, we focused on its most fundamental layers, that is, the things that made people spend their time on BookMooch.

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Over 4 months, we worked on task-segmentation, a survey, remote interviews and diary studies. We received substantial feedback from users. After the survey, 1,600 respondents expressed a willingness to participate in further research. We were quite impressed by the high level of engagement on this site. I particularly enjoyed doing the interviews. This may sound obvious but being close to users (via Skype) gave me a sense that the product was indeed real.

At the end of the project, we developed a report and personas to represent the main audiences. One of our most interesting findings was that people on BookMooch are attracted to its vibrant sense of community. After all, it's all about good-will and cooperation. Books were just one part of the whole experience. Users kept coming back to the site to share their love for books and the joy of sharing them.

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Kent State University's Flashline

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Flashline is the online system used by students at Kent State University to register for classes. It has a very complex architecture with 8 different main sections, which can be accessed through a tab navigation system. The interface of Flashline is divided into several chunks that can be minimized or expanded to fill the whole screen. Besides registration, students can use the system to do many other things, such as accessing their email accounts and checking tax information.

Every student has to use Flashline at least once a semester in order to register for classes. Because the system is a fundamental part of the academic experience at the university, it was important to evaluate its effectiveness and limitations. Students should be able to manage their course schedules with little effort and no frustration. We aimed to understand if that scenario was really true.

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We conducted usability tests with eye-tracking. Our goal was to evaluate the system's performance when students were: (1) looking up courses, (2) registering for courses, (3) dropping courses and (4) printing their student schedules. We collected data from 7 subjects, and each test took approximately 15 minutes. One good aspect about this project was that it was very easy to find people to participate. The volunteers were all close to us, on campus.

Flashline scored positively in several aspects, but we did find some problematic areas. While observing the students, we noticed how little gaps in the Information Architecture of the system can become big problems in the long run. For instance, the lack of clear labels was a main reason for misunderstandings. Most of the participants had problems navigating the major sections and finding where they were at or where should they go to.

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IA Summit Proceedings Archive

How great would it be if anyone could access any of the material from the IA Summit from every year? The IA Summit Proceedings Archive was intended to host all content, which would include presentations, pdf files, audio and other materials. From our perspective, this would be a great contribution for the whole IA community (and that was actually an important motivation for me during the project). Those who could not attend the conference would be able to access all that information for the first time. The attendees, on the other hand, would have the chance to recall the most interesting moments.

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We had 3 basic goals for this project: (1) to "unbury" all of the great presentation content gathered from past conferences, (2) to provide stable URLs for academic citation and finally (3) to make the presentation content easy for people to find.

The IA Summit Proceedings Archive was divided into 4 main entry points (i.e. year, type, speaker, title). The idea was to let users reach their destination as quick as possible regardless of the way they would use to get there. The wireframes changed a lot over 4 months and it was interesting to realize how iterations are an inherent part of design. Unfortunately, the site was just a pilot project, so we stopped at the wireframes and storyboards stage.

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Big Brother Brasil 5

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So, you put a bunch of strangers in a house full of cameras, and let them live together for a while. The participants must stay in the house and they are not allowed to receive any visitors. It sounds very awkward, but that's the idea behind the Big Brother reality show. And it's actually the awkwardness of it that makes Big Brother interesting. Over 3 months, the participants are asked to complete some tasks inside the house. Every week one participant leaves. The participant that stays in the house until the end gets the big prize.

Everything that goes on inside the house, 24 hours-a-day, can be seen on TV. And of course, there is always something going on in the house - friendships, jokes, gossip, affairs, lies etc. The show's website has a big role on the whole Big Brother experience. It provides different types of information, such as news updates, photos, videos, content for mobile devices and so on. The audience also contributes, and they can use the site to vote for the participant that should go out each week.

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Big Brother Brasil is currently in its 10th season (2010). I worked as an IA for the 5th season in 2005. The four previous editions of the show (2000-2004) had their own websites. Because of that, we were not starting from scratch. The problem though was that the program's rules were changing at that time and the previous sites would be too limited to support everything that was new. We were allowed to make as many changes as necessary in order to improve the site's architecture and design. This freedom was both challenging and exciting. We knew that we would have a lot of work to do, but at the same time we felt like we could really change things and give our personal touch on the product. And we knew that those things would have an impact on people's impression of the show.

Due to the great amount of content displayed on the site, we used "micro-homes" for each of its main sections. In other words, each micro-home was a window for what was inside that particular section. Breadcrumbs were also used to help users find their way (especially when accessing deeper areas). Our strategy allowed us to: (1) segment the content into very specific areas, (2) make the segmentation clear for users to understand and (3) use a consistent structure/navigation system all over the site. Furthermore, it also helped users to access and discover unusual content.

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