Welcome

I turned in my capstone paper on Friday. I haven't had a chance to put a write up on it in my portfolio yet but I have uploaded the paper.

http://www.jamiemcatee.com/portfolio/papers/capstone.pdf

I really enjoyed working on this project and hope that some of the ideas and recommendations that came out of this project will be implemented in the department.

I hope to post a summary on my portfolio soon but I am currently in the process of finishing interviewing and packing to leave Bloomington next week.

What a month it has been. Between graduation, my job search and working on my capstone presentation I haven't had much time to blog.

I presented my capstone on Friday and it was very well received by faculty and the international students. It looks like someone might be carrying on my research after I leave. I hope to post a video of the presentation before the week is over. I'll have more about that in my capstone blog. http://www.jamiemcatee.com/blog/index.php/capstone

I have updated the design of my portfolio and posted a few new pieces. I now have a final version of the Design Research Society paper that I worked on with Prof. Erik Stolterman, David Royer and Selvan Thandapani. http://www.jamiemcatee.com/port.php?ID=19

I have also added two short papers the first is a design critique of vacuum cleaners and a user evaluation of two potential article designs for a newspaper website.

One of my friends is looking into the way people use personas in design. We had a open discussion the other night about our capstones and she asked each of us to talk about how we use personas in design.

After a bit of thinking I have found that I have adapted this concept in a way that I find useful. For my capstone I have an idea of a few people I feel could benefit from what I am designing but I haven't written the details down about this person.

Also thinking about the CHI project we had a persona at one point in time but she didn't really end up being an exact target of our design. In this case we were designing for a group not one person.

Personas are a good way to introduce user centered design. I am not sure if people who have embraced the idea of user centered design and understand who they are designing for need to stick so closely to the persona tool. Does anybody else have thoughts on this?

Today I launched a capstone blog to keep track of where my research is currently. I'll be importing a few posts regarding capstone into that blog.

http://www.jamiemcatee.com/capstone

I have also posted my research competition paper there.

I will still post major capstone updates here but all updates will be found on the capstone blog.