My very first solo attempt at designing a system that will allow SMBs (small medium businesses) to get their inventory online via a software plugin that lives on their POS system.

• The user needs to be able to create an account, login, add their store address and download the plugin.
• The engineers needed a UI yesterday!

• Without any user research, no understanding of who the user is and only 2 days to understand the system and deliver a UI, this is just a face to access and test the functionality.
• This is ugly as heck. No user ever saw this. But it served its purpose of being a proof-of-concept—the system functions.

After the immediate need was over, I spent time doing some user research: talking to a few SMBs to understand who they are, what they do and the challenges that they face.

• Doing so helped me to undertand what is important to them to create some value propositions that would explain how this product would help them.
• The installation wizard made it easier to understand the steps that were involved. The entire installation process was simplified to take less than 15 minutes.
• This version is clean and prettier, but not quite there yet (icons were done by another design firm).

After more in depth user research and getting feedback from some SMBs, it became clear that the onboarding process was too complex with the switch between the web interface and the desktop installation.

• Registration and installation was moved entirely to the desktop client. The only onboarding interaction with the web would be to download the client.
• With the help of a visual designer who created the buttons and icons, the interface became more polished.

The onboarding process had been simplified, the challenge then was to improve conversion. Figuring out the remain UX issues (or lack of value propositions) that prevented SMBs from signing up.

Classic family tree visualizations display generational relationships well, but obscures other patterns and lack temporal context. This time-based, interactive visualization of family trees facilitates discovery of family patterns and secrets by making obvious various information: re-marriages, divorces, children born out of wedlock, polygamy, generation overlap, etc.

• Each lifeline represents a person.
• Marriages and divorces are represented with two lifelines joining and diverging, respectively.
• Children’s lifelines spawn from their parents’ lifelines/marriage line in the year that they were born.
• Color is used to discern patterns such as gender and generation.

A multi-disciplinary project for the Extreme Affordability class at Stanford’s d.school aimed at improving accessibility to public transportation for semi-mobile wheelchair users in Ethiopia. The low-cost, easy-to-use, device would hoist a wheelchair and secure it to the back of any minibus.

• Does not take up space inside the minibus (fare would cost more for rider).
• Wheelchair can be loaded in under a minute—minibus drivers make money by the number of passengers they pick up so time is critical. They will not wait for anyone.
• The pulley system reduced the effective weight of the 50-lb wheelchair by a 1/4 so that a teenage boy (driver’s assistant) can safely secure the wheelchair to the back of the minibus.

A multi-disciplinary project to create a more efficient method of packing and retrieval.

• 3 modes of input: automatic, pedal-based and weight-based.
• Users can tag boxes, categorize and add notes about them. Each box has images showing all the item in a box for easy retrieval.