Goal
Create an online system to help researchers initiate cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Process
In this 9 month capstone project, we designed and developed a system for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to help researchers find experts in other domains and initiate collaboration. I worked as Project Lead on a team of 5 students to conduct exploratory research and to design and test a solution. I conducted contextual interviews with researchers to better understand their goals and issues they faced. During the design phase, I generated concept storyboards and paper prototypes to tease out the most important values and needs. We then focused in on a few key concepts and generated a system that incorporated the main values addressed in these concepts. We held think aloud sessions with participants, and conducted heuristic evaluation of our end system. I co-developed a web prototype with another technical member on the team.

Results
We designed a solution called Digital Vita that provided an online repository for researchers to store their professional information. Using this repository, they are able to easily generate grant applications and also search through others' information to find relevant collaborators.

Digital Vita is currently in use at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. For more details on how we arrived at our solution, go here.

Final deliverables: (booklet) (presentation) (report)