student projects

Five HCI students recently submitted entries to Mozilla's University Design Challenge. The object of the challenge was to address browsing history: “How can we make sense of this rich source of data and how do we best present this data to the user?”

After an initial brainstorming session, the students worked individually or in teams to create mockups, prototypes and concept videos. Mozilla has blogged about the design challenge results, and some of the Mozilla Labs team will be giving our students personalized feedback over the phone next week. Check out the Design Challenge submissions from SI:

Natalia Fisher - Snapshot History

Natalia's Snapshot History allows users to visually scan and search for specific words or phrases in their browser history by displaying searchable thumbnail screenshots and a time frame selector. Check out her mockups.

Tom Haynes - Timeline

Instead of showing web history as a one dimensional list, Tom's Timeline includes additional contextual information (like time of day, duration of visit, browsing path to the page, whether pages were opened in a new tab or a new window, etc) to help people re-find the pages they were looking for. See his mockup and video.

Katie McCurdy and Kiran Jagadeesh - Firefox Foresight

Firefox Foresight uses past user browsing behavior and patterns in order to predict which websites they are likely to visit at a given time, and in a given place.  The system will make suggestions to users via a sidebar notification and recommendation system. Check out Katie and Kiran's concept description and narrated storyboard.

Jose Jimenez - Mozilla's History Browsing
Jose's timeline helps users remember which sites they have visited by providing a sliding timeline at the top that can be used to navigate back and forth. Users will visually see the sites they have been to and be able to see the path in the which they got to any given site. See Jose's concept description and prototype.

Next thursday, HCI graduate students at the University of Michigan School of Information will continue their partnership with Mozilla by participating in this fall's Mozilla Labs' University Design Challenge. This challenge asks students to research and design solutions around browsing history: "How can we make sense of this rich source of data and how do we best present this data to the user?"

The School of Information is one of four schools from three countries that is taking part in this challenge, and each school will take a slightly different approach. In our initial event we'll introduce students to the challenge, brainstorm and whiteboard ideas, and share them with one another. Then students will have individually or in small groups take their idea to the next level; this might be a series of mock-ups, a video, or even a prototype.

Over the past year, Mozilla and the U of M School of Information have worked together to put on several design jam sessions; and several SI students have submitted their work to Mozilla for review by other design challenge participants and the Mozilla Labs team. These experiences have benefitted SI students in a few ways: they've gotten valuable supplemental design practice, they've made themselves more visible in the design and open source community, and they've had the very exciting opportunity to work closely with and receive feedback from members of the Mozilla Labs team.

The following students' mockups, prototypes and video examples are available online:

• The TabViz team, which originated in SI's Information Visualization class, won the 'Best in Class' award at Mozilla's 2009 Summer Design Challenge. Props to SI students Jakob Hilden, Liz Blankenship, and Kerry Kao.
• Katie McCurdy submitted a mock-up and prototype to the Spring Design Challenge to communicate her ideas about being able see elements of different websites at the same time.
• Maureen Hanratty and Ian Tadashi Moore submitted a flash animation to last fall's Design Challenge (link forthcoming).

For more information on next week's event and to RSVP, check out the facebook event. And check out older posts on the design jams and challenges SOCHI has held in the past year.

Team TabViz, Jakob Hilden, Liz Blankenship and Kerry Kao, have won the 'Best in Class: Innovation' prize at Mozilla's recent Summer Design Challenge.

The trio began this project as part of their Information Visualization class at the University of Michigan School of Information in 2009. Liz and Jakob have now graduated, and Kerry will soon also complete her M.S. in Information with a specialization in HCI in 2010.

Congratulations to the TabViz team! You make us proud!

For the second year in a row, a team of SI students has won a spot in the competitive RPM-10 Venture Program, allowing them to create and work on their own startup company for 10 weeks during the summer. This year, SI students (l to r) Sergio Mendez, Eric Garcia, Ben Malley, and Jeremy Canfield have been busy at work for Phonagle, their company centered around developing social games for the iPhone. Recently, Phonagle and their workspace at the TechArb were featured in the Ann Arbor Chronicle.

This summer, several HCI students have continued SOCHI's history of participation in the Mozilla Labs Concept Series by participating in Mozilla's Summer Design Challenge on reinventing tabs in the browser. Participants from SI included Jacek Spiewla, Malhar Gupta, and the team of Jakob Hilden, Kerry Kao, and Liz Blankenship. You can vote for them from now until July 5th now for the "People's Choice Award".

Mozilla Labs Summer 2009 Design Challenge was announced today. The theme for the challenge is

Reinventing Tabs in the Browser - How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?

To participate all you need to do is make a mockup and a video explaining it (for more details go to the challenge website here). We highly encourage SI students to participate. It's great way to get your designs noticed by the UX community.

During the last week of school, the talented HCI students in SI's Information Visualization class presented their final projects. Check out photos and descriptions of most of the projects - and links to the project websites - at student Katie McCurdy's blog, sensical.wordpress.com.

HCI SI students were again top finishers in the CHI Student Design Competition. First place went to the TreasureHunter team of Sang Koh, Amy Kuo, Debra Lauterbach, Noah Liebman, and Andrea McVittie while team MIFresh with members Maureen Hanratty, Geoff Ho, Jiang Yang, and Xiao Wei, came in second place. Congratulations to all 5 semi-finalist teams!

Axure RP, a company which makes a rapid prototyping software tool that has become popular with students here at Michigan, is generously sponsoring the 5 teams of students from Michigan who were accepted to the CHI student design competition. Dani DuFrene, Marketing Manager for Axure, recently wrote a blog post on the Axure blog about two of the CHI teams and how they used Axure - you can check it out here: http://axure.com/cs/blogs/axure/archive/2009/03/05/Axure-Supports-HCI-St...

SI HCI student Katie McCurdy was selected last month to participate in the Mozilla Spring Design Challenge. On her blog she wrote about a recent tutorial session on Open Source Design by Mozilla Director of Design Josh Slater.