Week 10: Au Revoir

It is the last week of the ProHealth REU, so I have been busy the entirety of the week. My group has been working diligently on our paper, poster, video, and application development in anticipation of the symposium this Friday. I am thankful that I have had the opportunity to work in such an amazing program with such excellent staff and outstanding colleagues. While I am fairly certain I will not be returning to the realm of research and prefer to work in industry, I will never forget the valuable skills I have procured during the duration of this summer. I give whoever is reading this my gratitude for take an interest in my summer endeavors and hope you find yourself satisfied with the results I have produced (you can find a link to all the deliverables at the end of the blog post..

Monday July 23

Today I was stuck between a crossroads of poster design. One was a design I have created myself and the other was constructed using a format that Arash had shown the group, for he had created a poster previously. The two posters both had their respective advantages and disadvantages, one reliant on text for information relaying while the other using bullet points and concentrating on succinct text boxes with larges graphics. We are still waiting to get the IRB approved for our usability study, but as the hours continue on it looks increasingly doubtful. We will have to decide what results we shall showcase on our board in the event that the usability study does not take place. I did some more brainstorming for the video that is due by Friday and Arash worked on collection views with photos that the application has taken. Ray has worked on the paper and has done an excellent job, inserting additional sources to our related works. I will need to acquire some of these sources so I can mention them in the references on our poster. That’s all for today, I’ll concentrate on staying strong all the way to the finish.

Tuesday July 24

I had an especially productive day due to the meeting that I had with Ray and Dr. Siek. We were fairly certain that the IRB would not be approved in time, so Ray made an appointment with Dr. Siek at 5:00 PM to discuss the results we would put on the poster. It is unfortunate that we were hindered from disseminating the application to our colleagues for a usability study and procuring feedback from them, but we will just have to take another path. Dr. Siek watched me give a presentation of our poster and immediately pointed out that there was an overabundance of text on the poster. I needed to consolidate the bullet points and combine some of the headers into one. She suggested a better in depth explanation of our future developments by utilizing graphic visualizations and the cognitive walkthrough method. It is a tool used for user design that addresses four fundamental questions that a task should answer. By answering these questions the developers can then find flaws in the fluidity and structure of the application and make adjustments accordingly. With the new directionality that I received for the paper, I felt confident that the final product could be generated tomorrow.

Wednesday July 25

This morning Ray showed us the icon design for Epiphany and it looks great. The white logo with a green background contrast makes the application look inviting and follows our color scheme. The simplistic design suggests its usability falls on the easier side, inviting more user interaction. I continued work on the poster until it was completed. Here is the working final product. I say that it is final but I’m sure someone will make suggestions or some aspect will be restructured. Later in the day we had some former academic researchers talk to us and give us some advice about their graduate school experiences. After that I iterated on the poser some more, and Ray and I ran our Cognitive Walkthrough. It was really helpful in obtaining results and we were able to identify some User Interface areas of our application that needed improvement. I was then able to put the results of the walkthrough onto the poster in the results section. I then ket iterating and iterating on the poster. I stayed a the REU site until 9:15. It has progressed a long way, but more improvements must be made. After I arrived home I completed the press release and began transferring documents into the box repository for when I leave the REU. Two days left, and I will get everything completed not because I have the ability to, but because I must.

 

Thursday July 26

 

Friday July 27

 

Deliverables

Code/Data transferred to mentors as owners:

Final Academic Paper:

Research Video:

Poster:

Lightning Talk Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12RpIYGV7bxPIz6-geBN1HhbUoLnPNo_TmMoSfY4JpXc/edit?usp=sharing

Friday Morning Presentation Slides:  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SM92XjJ54B5hoDwmbDw5xvLlNUDEw_xL3Iei64s8igw/edit?usp=sharing

Personal Professional Website: https://msaganich10.wixsite.com/profile

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-saganich-a825a6126/

Professional Social Media Space: See LinkedIn and Personal Website

Press Release:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BtpdQ5xyR-5H4VeoVZNei0n5voWkFpk0/view?usp=sharing