Emily Ratsavong | Projects

User Experience

This research project analyzes the usability and accessibility challenges within The
Sims 4’s onboarding and navigation to identify redesign opportunities that
support player retention and reduce barriers for new players.

This project was completed for the UX Design Capstone at UW Madison.

BusTo - UX Design and Cultural Probe

For this project I used a cultural probe to understand user needs, problems, frustrations, breakdowns, and workarounds in the context of a mobile app. My user population is anyone who uses public transportation apps, specifically for the bus system in Madison, WI. The two particular users that I chose regularly use the bus because they live further away from campus. So they have the most experience using different bus routes and transit apps.

UX: Grocery Store App Interface

The assignment was to observe an activity and from that identifying the main problem that that activity faced. We chose the process of grocery shopping and defined our problem statement which was that "Grocery store layouts of categories, items, and checkouts should be efficient for customers". With that we conducted user interviews, generated ideas through affinity diagrams, wire-framed iterations of our app, and finally were able to design a prototype that would solve this issue.

Library Kiosk Design Ethnography

In my class CS 570: Intro to Human-Computer Interaction we were tasked with doing a design ethnography and creating a design for a technology a user could physically interact with. The goal of this project was to practice different UX research methods as well as to come up with a design that isn't necessarily just an app or website but a technology that required other physical interactions (ie. a SmartBoard).