Welcome to my website!

I recently graduated from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Psychology.

My main interests lie in the User Experience (UX) field. This interest started off with me asking to join in the new User-Centered Design (UCD) initiative at one of the first companies I did an internship at and quickly developed into an 8-month internship on the User Experience team at Research in Motion and a summer research project in the HCI lab at the University of British Columbia.

My usability photos of the month...

'This is my Stop' - A small step towards making one of my bus stop a little more user friendly.

Randy Pausch said in The Last Lecture,

"When we make something hard to use,
people get upset. They become so angry that they want to destroy it. We don't want to create things that
people will want to destroy."

I'm interested in taking that even further by making things that are not only frustration-free, but that people want to embrace (and I mean literally hug ...or in the very least enjoy).

Keyboard-Based Dialog Boxes
A research project at the University of British Columbia

Keyboard-based Dialog Boxes (KDB) is a new keyboard-based alternative to WIMP interfaces that allows the input of any number of parameters in any order. Our goal is to increase performance, improve experience, and minimize cognitive load. To accomplish this, KDB provides graphical feedback that looks and behaves very much like the dialog boxes users are familiar with, but with the speed of a command line interface. A laboratory experiment with experienced command line users showed that our new method is preferred to and performs competitively with WIMP dialog boxes.

Skills used: requirements gathering and definition, interface design, interactive prototyping, lab experiment, user interviews and questionnaires, data analysis

Hendy, J., Link, J., McGrenere, J. and Booth, K.S., Parameter Selection in Keyboard-Based Dialog Boxes. In proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11), (Vancouver, Canada, 2011), ACM Press, to appear. (link)

Please check out my resume/CV for other work I've done.

StickIt
An advanced Human-Computer Interaction course project

My project and I designed a mobile web application for posting and viewing user-generated location-based notes.
Skills used: requirements gathering and definition, interface design, wire framing, prototyping (paper and functional), lab experiment, user interviews and questionnaires, data analysis

Please check out our project video on the left.

NHS Kiosk Application Prototype
A Human-Computer Interaction course project

As part of this project, I designed a prototype for a kiosk application that would enable people to book appointments, order prescriptions and access information about local health care systems for the UK National Health Service (NHS).
Skills used: requirements gathering and definition, interface design, functional prototyping using Java/Swing

Click here to download the executable jar file.

I'm not all work and no play...

In my free time I enjoy...

Traveling the world - check out pictures from my travels in the section below.
Playing sports - mostly soccer and rugby, but currently I'm on a team in the Vancouver Dodgeball League.
Designing and creating jewelry - see some samples of my work on the right.

...and many other things!

Websites/Blogs I'm following: boingboing, everydayUX, The UX Booth, Vancouver is Awesome, xkcd, Johnny Holland Magazine, Homestar Runner, TechCrunch

Books I'm reading: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris, Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, Souls in the Great Machine by Sean McMullen, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks by David Whitaker, The Silent Gondoliers by William Goldman

I'd love to hear from you! Get in touch via...