<aside> 💬 Ginny is a senior majoring in Statistics & Machine Learning and HCI at CMU and minoring in Media Design through iDeATe. Previously, she’s interned as a UX Designer at TalkMeUp and contributed to multiple research projects @CMU Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
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“There's always a creative side of me that I wanted to try out—more visual stuff or more design-related stuff. I took some classes and started with a research project. All these experiences have been great, so that's why I decided to double major in HCI.”
“For statistics classes, if you work on a team project, you usually split the task and then each person takes one part, so it's less cooperative in that sense.”
“However, when doing an HCI project, because you have a lot of brainstorming sessions, and especially when you're working on design stuff, you sometimes need a pair of fresh eyes. There usually is a lot of back and forth communication, so being able to communicate effectively is very crucial.
“In general, it’s putting a lot of emphasis on people.”
<aside> 💬 A quick summary:
Stat classes: Focusing on solving the problem
HCI Classes: Communication and understanding each other is the most important.
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“In this project, I focused on designing an instructor dashboard to enhance in-class peer feedback sessions. We interviewed a bunch of CMU instructors, especially design class instructors. We tried to figure out what their needs are in regards to students’ peer feedback sessions. Then, we created a dashboard, where during an in-class presentation instructor can monitor real-time peer feedback while monitoring the presentation at the same time.”
<aside> 💬 A Note:
Check out PeerPresents, the product of their research at the website below, and learn more about Jessica Hammer, with whom Ginny has many good things to say! 👩🏫
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<aside> 🙋 What are some of your takeaways from this project?
“That project was fun because it's designing for a future state, where we have the preset where the cars are going to be fully autonomous. What we're trying to do is to design a ride-share app. It basically Uber for autonomous cars, and it is also for people with disabilities. It's definitely challenging because you don't know what's going to happen in the future, so you just have to make a lot of assumptions.”
<aside> 🙋 What did you learn from doing this project?