Hyundai Shield is is an Apple watch app designed for Hyundai owners. This app reacts to users' location, behavior and context to help save time and money, and give peace of mind. This project was part of my coursework for Human-Computer Ineraction at Carnegie Mellon University.

Team size: 5

My Role

• Created persona for the app based on user research and interviews with Hyundai car owners.
• Documented pain points from user research and prioritized them using a prioritization matrix.
• Brainstormed solutions for the top problems identified.
• Documented use cases for the ideal solution. Created a storyboard for the problem and ideal solution.
• Created low-fidelity wireframes for the use-cases.
• Validated low-fidelity mockups with users to receive early feedback.
• Re-iterated and made high-fidelity mockups.

Skills

• Contextual Inquiry
• Persona creation
• Building Scenarios
• Storyboarding
• Wireframing
• Prototyping

Sample Work

The user we reached out to for formative research were economical, Asian-car owners, who also owned Apple products. Formative research taught us that our target users cared most about value for money. We created a persona, James Williams for our product, based on the findings of primary research. This helped focus our solution on his needs. Having a singl value proposition helped us propose the solution for a minimum viable product, and not get distrcted by feature creap. Here's the storyboard for the problem identified. Here's the storyboard for the solution proposed. Here are some screens of the high-fidelity mockups.

Study of Linkedin is a report on Linkedin's target market, financial health and business strategy based on historical data, as well as a two-year prognosis into the future. This study was a part of my coursework done for Foundations of Software Management at Carnegie Mellon University.

Team size: 5

My Role

• Assessed a software company from a business perspective. Used methos such as SWOT and PESTLE.
• Performed secondary research from reliable sources, including Gartner.
• Applied strategic thinking to analysis of this information.
• Analyzes financial status and trends of Linkedin. Discussed profitability in terms of standard ratios (ROA, ROE, EPS, operating margin) and drew conclusions on business health
• Characterized software business by market strategy and execution approaches.
• Identified a two-year desired state for the business.

Skills

• Secondary research
• Product strategy
• Financial analysis
• Business prognosis

Sample Work

Check out the slides for our final project presentation here: Study of Linkedin.

Here is a snippet of SWOT analysis. Here are some snippets of the financial analysis data I gathered.

Check out my design portfolio on Behance: Darshana's Design Portfolio.

Here is the infographic on "The Ideal Leader" I created. I worked with a team of 4 other members on the contents of the infographic. This was part of coursework for Leadership Challenge course at Carnegie Mellon University.

I'm very passionate about empowering women in technology. While I was in India, I mentored a group of schoolgirls in Bangalore to create an Android app prototype for an internation competition called Technovation Challenge. We were asked to create an android app prototype for a social/healthcare-related cause. After a lot of brainstorming, we decided to create an app to help users store medical prescriptions and interact with doctors remotely.

Here's a video of the product pitch created by my team.
Here's a video of the product demo.

The intersection of computer science and art fascinates me a great deal. Here's some of my tech art-work : Darshana's Codebits.

Showcase is a platform to organize, showcase and discover research knowledge. I worked on this project with a team of 4 others as part of my Capstone Project at Carnegie Mellon University.

Problem Statement:

• Showcasing research knowledge on specific areas of interest is difficult.
• Discovering people with deep interest in specific areas of interest and their depth of understanding is difficult.

Solution:

• A social platform to build the repository of research based knowledge resources to showcase your passion and understanding on top 3 areas of interest and to discover people with deep interest in different areas

High Fidelity Mockups: App creation process:

The purpose of this study was to perform market research on the perks in technology companies in Bay Area that are most useful for retention of talent. This project was part of my coursework for Marketing Research at Carnegie Mellon University.

Team size: 4

My Role

• Identified a research problem of personal interest that would benefit the broader Silicon Valley and CMU community.
• Performed secondary research on the topic of perks.
• Performed formative research on potential interview-takers on the topic.
• Created a survey that was improved over few iterations.
• Recruited participants to take the survey.
• Collected survey feedback and consolidated results.
• Created an infographic of the results obtained to summarize findings in a nutshell.

Skills

• Contextual Inquiry
• Persona creation
• Building Scenarios
• Storyboarding
• Wireframing
• Prototyping

Sample Work

Here's a sample snapshot of the survey. A total of 87 participants took our survey. They worked at companies of all sizes. Here are our learnings of the research. I summarized our research using this infographic below.

I conceptualized a new feature for a popular product called Duolingo. Here are details of the product and my feature proposal.

Introduction to Duolingo
Duolingo is a leading free language-learning platform that offers language courses across 23 different languages. It caters to over 100 million users and is available on desktop, iOS, android and windows platforms. The platform is ad-free and utilizes a crowdsourced business model where users participate in translation and voting on translations. Organizations pay Duolingo to have content translated.

Opportunities for Improvement
I have tried using Duolingo and believe it’s a great platform to learn a new language. I love Duo, the owl mascot that asks me to take up lessons everyday. I love the fact that I can add friends and challenge them to compete with me for points. However, in spite of all these hooks to come back to the platform everyday, I find myself slipping away because I don’t prioritize language learning over other activities on a day to day basis. This is because I am not compelled to learn a language as a part of course requirements in school. I am doing it for my own sake, and I lack the motivation to set aside time everyday to learn. However, I still seem to find the time to play games on my mobile phone and browse social media on a daily basis. I believe Duolingo can leverage the human attitude of postponing tasks vs engagement with real-time interactions to create an engaging translation game experience for users.

Feature: Play Translation Quiz Game with Friends & Other Duolingo Members
I believe Duolingo can use gamification to make me engage with the platform every single day. It would be great if I could play a translation game real-time with my friends. Even if my friends are not available, I could play the game with any other user on the platform. This feature is different from the feature of challenging my friends to reach a goal because it’s much more real time - I am in the moment, competing with my friends. Also, I often set goals like New Year Resolutions that I don’t follow very meticulously. This feature however, is not about setting a goal and working on it later. It’s about practising more right now.

Objectives

• Improve user engagement: To ensure that users spend more time translating words/sentences on Duolingo.
• Improve user delight: To ensure that learning is made more fun through a game-like experience.
• Improve speed/quantity of translation: To ensure that users spend more time on Duolingo paying quizzes and in turn, translating sentences. This will result in quicker translations of articles.
• Attract new users to the platform: This feature is to serve as a bait to attract users who enjoy playing games in general, and are not necessarily on the platform to learn a new language. This may include experts in a language who want to just have some fun.


Storyboard: Use case : Sarah challenges her friend Tony to a medium level French quiz on Duolingo.


Feature Set
This feature enables users on Duolingo to play a translation game with friends and other users of the platform. The following are the requirements of the feature:

• A user can initiate a quiz in any language.
• User can choose the level of the quiz. There are three levels for each quiz - easy, medium and hard.
• User can choose to play the quiz with a known friend or any other user.
• If user chooses to play with a known friend
  • User selects specific friend for challenge
  • Friend gets a notification about the request
  • Friend can accept (now or later) or decline challenge
• If user chooses to play with any random user (User is matched to any user who has initiated quiz with same language and level)
• If no one is available to take up challenge, user is shown a message saying “We’ll notify you as soon as we have matched a player for you.” (In the case of the native mobile app, push notifications are sent to the user, In the case of the desktop version of the app, popup notifications are sent to the user)
• Each quiz has ten questions. (Questions are multiple choice questions. This is to remove discrepancy of differences in speed of typing errors while typing on different devices [phone may be tougher to type on than desktop]. Initially, questions will be curated by language specialists at Duolingo. Eventually, questions can be picked from translated article database. Difficulty level of questions can be determined by translation statistics for articles.)
• There are five quizzes under each difficulty level for each language to begin with. More quizzes will be added eventually.
• A user can take each quiz only once, to ensure fairness of game.
• The structure and evaluation of each quiz is as follows:
• Each question has a stipulated time in seconds. Time can vary from question to question.
• Every user is scored based on how many questions are answered correctly and the time taken to answer the question. Player who answers faster gets more points.
• One user cannot proceed to the next question until the other user has also completed the question or the time limit for that question has been exceeded.
• User can see his score as well as opponent’s score at each stage of the quiz.
• Either user can exit the quiz at any time. If a user ends the quiz before completing it, the opponent is the default winner.
• After game is over, user can challenge same user or some other user to another quiz.
• Based on the number of quizzes a user wins, user receives virtual trophies.


Mockups

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