Sallie Wormer

Participants in a diary study about online technical community usage clustered at different points on behavioral vectors.  By splitting the clusters into two personas - a seasoned veteran and a hungry young developer - the results suddenly made much more sense.  Solo research project for Field Methods course.

Client:  Pegasystems | Cambridge, MA | 2016

By shifting the focus to users' abilities and goals over content, I increased intranet usage six-fold.  As an example, after analyzing the Institutional Review Board's (IRB) process, I automated their proposal submission/review using a multi-phase multi-condition workflow.  This included redesigning the proposal form and soliciting usability feedback with iterative testing.

IRB @ Carlow University | Pittsburgh, PA | 2015

The Youth Media Advocacy Project (YMAP) pairs university communication majors with high school classes in under-served districts which often lack consistent classroom technology.  The elevator speech lesson was originally conceived as a video, but I opted to design and create a graphic novel using actual images of the students. It was well received by the students, and was part of a year long curriculum stabilization project that I oversaw.

YMAP @ Carlow University | Pittsburgh, PA | 2016

There was frustration about ordering course books from all sectors at our institution. By observing behavior and asking questions, I was able to document the collective processes and show that it was a problem for systems thinking to solve.

Carlow University | Pittsburgh, PA | 2012

Performance racing requires fast decision making and continual situation awareness under extreme physical conditions - a heavy cognitive load for sure.  As even our regular cars seem to be getting overly complicated, this design review looked at a racing steering console under the framework of working memory. Foundations in Human Factors solo course project.

Client: none

As a musician I'm often looking for 'chords in all the wrong places.'  This site needed serious help.  After a heuristic evaluation, I sketched a redesign to move the main menu so it doesn't look like it's part of the logo, co-locate and align related functions, eliminate redundant information, change the transposition control from a slider to a drop down (singers can't use 'relative' changes), make hidden-but-essential tools visible, keep sizes uniform, think about changing color palette (not shown) to reduce salience on unimportant things, and the list goes on. 

Client: none | 2016