danielchen.me

Daniel Chen, M.Sc.

User Experience Consultant

A highly motivated user experience professional with experience in several sectors.

Learn More »



About Daniel

I am a user experience consultant and designer based in Toronto, Canada. I have several years of experience designing simple and elegant user experiences for companies in various sectors including banking (the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, CIBC), advertising (BBDO Proximity, Leo Burnett), social media marketing (Social Dynamics Interactive) and e-commerce (Novator). My skills include gathering requirements, designing interfaces, and user testing of those interfaces to ensure ease of use.

I graduated from Engineering Science (Computer Engineering Option) at the University of Toronto, where I regularly worked at the EyeTap Personal Imaging (ePI) Lab. After finishing my undergrad, I worked in Korea for Samsung Electronics at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology where I learned a lot about the "real" world but also about life in general. I finished my Master's degree in Computer Science at Queen's University under the supervision of Roel Vertegaal at the Human Media Lab.

Skills
  • User Experience and User Interface Design
  • Gathering and Defining Requirements
  • Communicating design through information architecture documentation: wireframes, storyboards, site maps, UI specifications etc.
  • Preparing for and Conducting User Testing
Resume


My Process

My work follows a consistent pattern, understanding a complex problem, determining the requirements, designing a user experience that supports the requirements, and conducting user testing to improve the usability of the existing solution.

1. Understanding the Problem

Understanding the problem that the organization is trying to solve is a very important step. This may involve an investigative approach, speaking to users, stakeholders (owners and maintainers), customers, and anyone else who has a stake in the use of the system. At this stage the problem can for example be broken down into sub-problems according to the various people involved. Often using tools such as personas can help in modelling the nature of the problem better.

2. Determining Requirements

Based on a thorough understanding of the problem, the requirements can be defined from a business, user and technical stand point. Often, the needs of these various groups may conflict, so it's at this stage that some negotiation be involved between parties to make designing a solution easier. At this stage, requirements documents such as use cases can be helpful because they clarify exactly what needs to be done by the system in conjunction with the user.

3. Designing UX solutions

This stage involves a storm of activity to model the problem in diagrams, post-it notes, sketches, and mockups to prototype potential user experience (UX) solutions. Although it may seem chaotic, constraints on the design as determined through the requirements phase, help guide the chaos, ensuring a design that supports requirements.

Often, there is already an existing system that needs to be re-designed. In this case, techniques such as heuristic evaluation or expert reviews are enough to determine the usability pitfalls that exist and determine better solutions to improve the interface.

4. User Validation

Conducting User Testing

After some solution has been modelled, a prototype may be tested to determine if our underlying assumptions are correct and whether or not the design meets the needs of the users. Testing may involve something as simple as showing a paper-prototype to users to determine if the screens "make sense" or need to be tweaked further

A/B Testing

In some cases, we may perform A/B testing, where large numbers of users are presented with two versions of the same product and we can then decide what needs to be tweaked.

Online research

If we are fortunate enough to have access to discussion forums, we can elicit feedback that can inform the design as well.



Portfolio

BBDO - Proximity

place holder

Pepsi - Pepsiaccess.ca

1. Understanding the Problem

Proximity is a dynamic interactive advertising agency under the BBDO group. At Proximity, I worked for several clients, however the largest client which I spent the most time on was Pepsi. Pepsi wanted to redesign their existing Pepsiaccess.ca website. The existing site was focused on redemption of Pepsi points (which could be found in Pepsi bottle caps), however this approach had a limited reach of potential customers, and it did little to re-enforce to Pepsi brand. Pepsi needed to have a fresh approach, one that took advantage of it's various content partners.

2. Determining Requirements

Instead of offering a small number of users prizes, Pepsi's new website needed to offer an experience to it's users. This meant bringing together it's various content partners (such as music, sports and games), and tying this new content together in a coherent way that reflected the vibrancy of the Pepsi brand.

3. Designing UX solutions

To design the Pepsiaccess.ca user experience, I worked in collaboration with a team of graphic designers, copy writers, project managers, and technology partners. This involved meeting often through out the day to exchange ideas, and conceptualize what design could support the needs of users and satisfy the business requirements of Pepsi. In addition to this, I regularly performed expert heuristic reviews to catch any usability issues. The resulting information architecture documentation, which was scrutinized by the entire team, included wireframes, site maps, and user flows.

4. User Validation & Results

When I first joined the Pepsiaccess.ca project, the original points-based website had launched. I conducted online research of the existing site to determine what issues users had. Based on discussion forum research, I constructed a graph illustrating the most common problems users had with the site. These results were presented to the team, and the feedback was incorporated into the re-design of the Pepsiaccess.ca website.

Colorectal Cancer Screening Initiative Foundation

1. Understanding the Problem

Colorectal cancer is one of the most deadly forms of cancer, yet it is preventable with early detection. The Canadian Colorectal Cancer Foundation's (CCSIF) goal was to spread awareness about colorectal cancer and encourage early screening. CCSIF had an existing web site, however it was poorly designed and organized. Proximity offered to do some pro-bono (free) work for CCSIF, and assigned me the job of independently investigating improvements that could be made for the usability and ultimately user experience of the existing website.

2. Determining Requirements

Based upon the poorly designed and organized website, it became clear that CCSIF would require a usability report to document precisely what they needed to fix in their next re-design. A report such as this would require a heuristic evaluation or review, which would systematically go through the various usability pit falls the site currently had. The report would also need to offer suggestions to improve the overall design and usability of the website.

3. Designing UX solutions

The heuristic evaluation technique used on this website was based upon a number of leading user experience experts including Jacob Nielsen. The sources of the heuristic evaluation were cited in the report to provide further reading to the client if they so wished to. Each page of the website was carefully scrutinized against the heuristics, and compiled into a long list. An evaluation was provided for each page, and the usability pain points were separated into sections according to design, content and navigation. Screenshots and labels were used to illustrate precisely where the usability issues existed.

4. User Validation & Results

The account manager that assigned me this project found my report so compelling, that he felt it was too valuable to give away completely free to the client. Instead, he felt it would be better to give a condensed power point version to the client and possibly be able to charge money for the rest of the report later.



Publications



Research

You can find below a number of projects which I've been involved in over the years. You will need the divx codec to view the video:

Physiologically Attentive User Interface (PAUI)


Predicting User Availability from physiology: We often need to let others know how available we are to prevent being interrupted when we are busy, or to receive notifications when we are available. Typically, instant messenger users let other users know their current availability for interruptions by manually toggling a status bar. The PAUI was an Attentive User Interface that allowed a computer to automatically determine the availability (or interruptability) of a user and display this information to others.
Click the image for a clip on PAUI from the Discovery Channel Feature. [mpg 32 MB]
Click here for the entire Discovery Channel Feature on Attentive User Interfaces. [mpg 72 MB]
Click here for my Master's Thesis: "The Physiologically Attentive User Interface: Towards a Physiological Model of Interruptability". [mpg 10 MB]

Direct User Interface


Using Real Hands for Virtual Interaction: One of the most interesting input devices is the EyeTap which is a type of electric eyeglasses that allows users to experience mediated reality, whereby a computer can computationally modify the user's perception of reality. In this way it becomes possible to interact with virtual and real worlds, both at the same time. One of my graduate school projects was to allow for hands to be used for interaction, since hands are one of the most natural extensions of the human body to interact with objects. I wrote some computer vision code based around some OpenCV demos that tracked the hand, allowed for a virtual marker to be manipulated and recognized basic gestures.
Click the image for a movie. [mpg 19.4 MB]
Click the image for a movie. [mpg 7.2 MB]

Digital Signage and Video Jockeying


Real--Time Video Effects: I've always liked clubbing with my friends and I thought it would be neat to bring what I've been experimenting with at school to the nightclub. Nightclubs understand the importance of delivering an experience and so do Human Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers. I, along with a group of colleagues with a background in computer graphics and computer vision, co--founded a Video Jockey crew called adfusium.com that would perform at local nightclubs. We first began performing at Elixir in Kingston, writing the video jockeying code during the day while staying up late at night mixing the videos live. We used a mixture of live feeds and previously recorded video. Later, we helped set up permanent "Designer digital signage" systems at Elixir so that they could use the systems for pushing their advertising content while patrons lined up at the bar.
Click the image for a movie. [mpg 4.51 MB]
Click the image for a movie. [avi 3.29 MB]

Direct Transfer Via Gloves


While working at Samsung Electronics I joined an existing group that was interested in an accelerometer based glove called Scurry. Scurry had 6 degrees of freedom. Scurry allowed for users to type in the air, and also move a mouse, without the need of a referential sensor (it was entirely MEMS based). However, if we look at how people use their hands, for millions and millions of years, much of it is to carry things. With this reasoning, I introduced a completely novel use of Scurry, that was to allow users to carry virtual information around and exchange it with others, much as they would do with their own hands.
Email me if you are interested in full details on the work.

Presentations and Talks



Interests

Causes

Languages

  • French, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Some Korean

Favorite Books

  • Kip Thorne, "Black Holes and Time Warps"
  • Daniel Chen, "The Interesting Lives of Aardvarks" (still unpublished and unreviewed)


Contact

  • e-mail: chend @ cs.queensu.ca
  • skype: hicamproject