Welcome to my Portfolio

Virtuoso Virtual Sheet Music System is a revolutionary, portable, folding device that digitizes and stores sheet music. Virtuoso has double-sized screen display and features that would allow more entertainment and flexibility in music practicing. Virtuoso enables musicians to browse, add, and remove music pieces in the online Music Library; use practice aids, such as “Playback” feature when they want to hear how a piece of music sounds; use group sync feature in a collaborative playing environment.


Virtuoso is a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) class project on which I have worked with three other computer science students. The project spanned ten weeks and involved contextual inquiry, task analysis, low-fidelity prototyping, video prototyping, usability testing and ultimately a high-fidelity prototype.

The artifact is the website we built to document the design process. A demo of the interactive prototype and the various reports we completed throughout the project can also be found on this website.

I interned as software product UX designer at EMC Corporation in the past summer, under the Information Service Group. EMC leads in cutting-edge technologies, such as cloud computing. I have been working with the engineers and product managers closely to design and redesign the user interface of one specific cloud-computing software product.

EMC Documentum under Information Service Group has a series of products called xCP family. The mission of xCP family is to accelerate the development of intelligent Case Management applications and automate business processes to improve efficiency and compliance. Within the family, xCelerated Management System (xMS) is a product that helps Documentum administrators who need to simplify the deployment of the private cloud that optimizes EMC Documentum for VMware infrastructure. When I first got to EMC, Product Manager Randy Hodge proposed the great idea to me and the other UX designer that a UI needed to be created to improve the usability of the xMS Tool. There was no UI involved; system administrators (who interact with Documentum) and VMWare administrators need to configure servers or provision the deploy environment by updating, uploading, and downloading a XML file constantly. I led the UI design project, and I spent much time communicating with the engineers, product managers, and cloud architects to understand the complex infrastructure behind the cloud environment. We had more than ten rounds of design iteration so far, and improved the UI via seven rounds of iteration.

Sharedbites is a project for a MBA/Engineering class: Design and Development of Web-based Products and Services. The idea of Sharedbites comes from a common scenario from our life: Young professionals or college students are usually busy at work or school and they have trouble with grabbing food with others.

Sharedbites helps Find and create lunches with your friends and extended network and stay in touch with your friend. SharedBites comes out of a common need to help follow through on the all too familiar "Let's do lunch!" or "Pencil me in!" requests you get from your friends.

We also explored from an analytics perspective for this product. We analyzed our #1 competitor, Grubwithus.com's keywords, as well as each keyword's Global Monthly Searches, Competition level, Cost Per Click (CPC), Daily Clicks, and Click Through Rate (CTR). We also peeked inside competitor's keyword density, inbound and outbound links, and analyzed each URL for anchor text, keywords or acronyms in the URL path. With a combinition of these types of knowledge, we improved our own strategies in building Sharedbites.com and tried to make it more visible among the search results.

This a design project, a coding project, as well as an analytics project. For the entire design and coding process, please go to "See the Process."

This project focused on the total amount of economic foreign aid the US has given to countries around the world, starting from 1960 to 2010. In addition to looking at the amount being donated and who was receiving money, we also looked at Google's news archive to find top stories for that year. We were curious to see if top news stories could tell us "Why" money was being donated.

I have been very interested in knowing the relationship between obesity and income level. My hypothesis was "the level of obesity is contra-­‐proportional to the level household income" in America’s states. In other words, the poorer the state is, the more obese population it has. The data types I collected include "Median Household Income," "Percentage of Obese Population," and "Population." All of the data types covered from 1996 to 2010, with each American state specifically listed. I decided to use JavaScript to create a cartogram that showed each state as a bubble or circle.

A classmate and I were interested in getting a better understanding of places around the UC Berkeley campus and therefore intuitively considered using Yelp or Google Maps reviews. Since Yelp has an academic data set that contains “all the data and reviews of the 250 closest businesses for 30 universities” we chose to leverage it for the purpose of this assignment. The data set included three types of data objects: businesses, reviews, and users. We were mostly interested in the business objects, which contained the ratings. During concept exploration we considered leveraging data such as time-stamps and reviews, but realized that this would pose to complex a problem as we were still learning the basics of the tools.

If I have more time in the future I would like to use a JavaScript library or mobile friendly interactive map, such as leaflet, to present the data in a geographical way.

Google Latitude is a location-aware mobile application, similar to a GPS device. Latitude allows a mobile device user to allow certain people to track their location. A user can use Latitude on their phone, computer, or both. Most people are concerned with their privacy, but Latitude allows users to control their privacy settings. Users control the accuracy and details of what other users can see.

This usability study was conducted to achieve our team's target goal, which was to evaluate the accuracy and the ease of use for Google Latitude. In addition to our main target goal, we have come up with central research questions that focus on our product as well as incorporate the user that fits our desired profile. Some questions included: Can participants determine when Google Latitude is providing less than accurate results? Can users easily back track?

The usability research tools used for this project included: Consent Forms, Study Session Check List, Phone Screener,Faciliation Script,Task Booklet for Participants, Lab Test Results Surveys & Questionnaires for Participants, Data Collection, Formatting, and Coding Instructions, Spreadsheet for Survey Data, and Video Camera.