The capstone project is a 32-week comprehensive course for master’s students at CMU, where students are put into interdisciplinary groups to work on building a solution with clients in the industry. My team, Foundry, was paired with Bloomberg LP. Bloomberg employees all use the Bloomberg Professional Service (or, the Terminal) in their daily collaboration activities. Our challenge was to observe and devise a Terminal solution to improve internal collaboration at Bloomberg.

Due to proprietary information, I cannot disclose further on the project. Below is a summary of specific tasks I have done during the project.

For additional information about the process, visit the project website.

Goals

• Present an interactive prototype that employees can envision using daily
• Provide clear documentation and requirements, and feasible next steps to make in-house development easier

Challenges

• Support from various stakeholders in the company is needed before project will be considered
• Demonstrate a real need and justify it in terms of company resources

Research – Spring

The team travelled to New York to perform field research, and observed 27 employees in total. We performed background research to familiarize with various existing collaboration tools, and analyzed the best ones. Led the literature review on topics about enterprise information seeking, computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), and human factors, surveying a total of 36 academic papers. As a team, modeled and put data points in an affinity diagram. Came up with scenarios and drew storyboards during the visioning process.

Design – Summer

As the user experience lead, I led the iterative design process. Made sure the design addresses our research findings by connecting data with personas. Worked with the design lead on translating information hierarchy to visuals. Managed scope of design. Developed lo-fi prototypes and facilitated the transition to higher fidelity prototypes. Designed and coded the project website.

Spotlight On The User Experience from Bloomberg LP. This video briefly showcases our team working on the project.

Project Website

As web lead, I designed and built the project website.

Wireframes

Determined website content and architecture. Reviewed other project websites and decided against the one page scroll layout, as it is harder to distinguish between sections.

Mid-fidelity

As key navigation is determined, I began visual explorations. The goal was to incorporate elements from Bloomberg’s visual style but also be distinguishable from the company.

Final

The final iteration was designed with specifications that I knew to be compatible with web development (such as responsive grids, mobile), as I built the website afterwards. Visit the website