Personal Projects
iHeart Media Hackathon Project
During my internship at iHeart Media in 2019, I learned about the yearly Hackathon the company sponsors and worked together with a small team to create a functional prototype for an app we designed. This project was a lot of fun! It was my first time ever using the Flutter SDK created by Google. It was relatively straightforward, which was crucial for a timed event like Hackathon, and my teammates and I worked tirelessly for 24 consecutive hours.
I created all of the graphics for this app and designed the functional hierarchy and flow. I also carved out the development timeline and prioritization during this short time frame. Though our app didn't win the competition, we had a lot of fun learning a new SDK and making something we believe would bring a lot of value to the company.
Tap Cats
A unique tap game with original graphics and fairly simple code. The object of the game is to tap as many falling feline heads as possible to gain points, while not letting too many fall. Each level increased the speed and number of cats that fall. The game was inspired by my own cat, Sunshine, the beautiful model used in the game.
Tap Cats was my first "real" game, and the first game I ever published to the Google Play store. I still cherish this silly game and remember fondly the many sleepless nights spent de-bugging. Through making this game, I learned just how much goes into making even a simple tap game, and I really fell in love with the creative and technical side of indie mobile game development.
Music Streaming App
After surveying a few people on their favorite and least favorite parts of popular streaming apps, I made a prototype for an app that increases the usability and visibility of the most used features while still keeping the well-loved features. The color, font, transparency, layout, and flow were all conscious decisions made with the user in mind.
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I loved making this music app. It made me pay close attention to the features I use most often in my favorite music streaming apps and the features I didn't know existed. This prototype walked me through the process of user survey, wireframe, rapid mockup, and user testing just like I would if I were designing an app for a future employer. It gave me practical experience with the design process, provided a fun creative outlet, and made me fall more in love with user experience design.
Travel Buddy
Travel Buddy was the final project for my first HCI class, and is an app that consolidates and manages all of the details and complications that come with traveling. It saves the user's profile and personal settings, displays the weather and calendar, and provides a weekly and daily breakdown of the trip. Users can add and edit details, destinations, and travel plans within the app, and search details about places and things to do all over the world.
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Because this was the first major project I worked on in HCI, there were a lot of design decisions I made that I wouldn't make today. But even though I don't think it's the best design, I'm still immensely proud of the work I did on the app and with the overall final design. For the first time, I got to see the iterative design process hard at work on a project I was extremely passionate about. I think with more time and revision, Travel Buddy could become a wonderful and useful tool for travelers everywhere.
Chapel App
In HCI II, we were tasked with redesigning the very poorly designed app we used to view and attend chapel events across campus. The primary goals of this app are to display the user's current standing with chapel credits, display a map of chapel events and a list of their meeting times and locations, and also provide the option to check in to a chapel that was within range of the user's GPS location.
The chapel app assignment from HCI II was actually much more work than I initially thought. Even though I thought I knew exactly what the app should do and look like, feedback from polled students said otherwise. Because the app was currently such an unusable mess, the expectations for what the app could or should do were pretty unclear. Using that muddled and mixed feedback, I set to work on what I thought was a fair compromise of what the user wanted the app to do and what could realistically be expected of it to do reliably. This assignment taught me how to navigate conflicting user feedback and make an app that the user needs, whether or not the user knows.