Career

I Was A GeeXBoX Interaction Design Candidate

This morning I received an email from Celeste Lyn Paul, an incredibly awesome (from what I Googled) usability/interaction designer about the GeeXBoX project sponsored by the Open Usability: Season of Usability 2007 effort. They were inquiring whether I was able to commit 10-15 hours a week on the project as a requirement for consideration. Say wha?!

Backstory:
I was a little worry wart a few months back concerned with the level of experience I’ve acquired towards being an interaction designer. In fact, I had little, other than school. So after browsing through the interweb, I found this awesome project where I would be working on a Media Player application’s User Interface. After reading over the qualifications, it sounded almost like the perfect opportunity. So I sent in my resume and they acknowledged receiving it. From what I understood the website said they would reach me sometime in December. Cool beans. I sent in the application a month ago hoping to hear back soon~

So here I am now, given this news I am still in consideration to participate in this wicked cool project, but I’ve already accepted my offer with the Center for Environmental Visualization mentioned a couple weeks ago. By all means having the opportunity to work with either groups is a blessing, but boy, would working on a media player be exciting. Why I’m emphasizing this fact is that I have plans to meet with the Senior Lead Developer for the Windows Media Player application early January. Having media player experience prior to graduation would give me huge leverage in my credentials as a usability/interaction/user interface (blah blah blah) designer.

Here’s what the project entitles:

Project Opening: GeeXBoX

The application

The GeeXboX is an awesome standalone media player. GeeXboX is a full operating system, running under Linux and based on the excellent MPlayer. No need for a hard drive, you just have to put the GeeXboX bootable CD into the CD-Drive of any Pentium-class or Apple Macintosh computer to boot it. The whole thing can be managed by a either a keyboard, a remote controller or a joystick, thanks to its full OSD (On Screen Display) Menu.

The project: Design a new, cool and usable media interface

For the next software revision, GeeXboX would like to improve not only the architecture, but the interface. You will get the opportunity to work directly with the developers to help create a new, cool, and usable media interface.

Project tasks include:

User research which includes conducting an online survey, interviews with acutal users, and creating user personas.
Conduct an expert interface review of the current system, and based on user research and your findings, propose redesign suggestions.
Work closely with the developers and iterate design changes, conducting mini-expert reviews after each interface revision until a new, cool, and usable media interface has been developed.

The Mentors

Your usability mentor will be Celeste Lyn Paul. She is an interaction architect in Washington, D.C. and an active contributor to the KDE Usability Project and OpenUsability.

Your Technical mentor will be Ben Zores, one of the core maintainers of GeeXboX. You will work closely with him during the development process to implement your recommended interface suggestions.

Your Qualification

This project requires experience in interface and interaction design as well as some experience in usability analysis methods. This is meant to be a learning experience, so don’t worry as long as you understand the basics in design and usability.

Anyways, I hope everyone is having a great break and I can’t wait to see everyone again!

Cheers