Design Student of the Month – Dandan Huang

There are a lot of creative students in Canada who are doing innovative work to improve people's life through interactive, visual, informational, and other aspects of User Experience Design. I invited them to introduce who they are and share their work with you. To nominate a Design Student of the Month, email us. The Design Student of the Month for March 2009 is Dandan Huang! Congratulations!! Let's hear from Dandan.

Who’s Dandan?

I am a recent graduate Master student in the Department of Computer Science, at University of Victoria. My supervisor is Dr. Melanie Tory who is a super smart and nice lady. It is her who opened the door for me to the world of interaction design and information visualization. In the era of overwhelming information, I believe intuitive graphical representations of data and user-centered design can make life easier for people, working efficiently and entertaining with fun.

What cool stuff is Dandan doing?

I worked on several projects in terms of information visualization, cscw, and user-centered design.

In one of the research project, we compared the visualization techniques ( Sunburst and Matrix-based visualization) of access right, e.g. the access of personal information online. The two novel methods used to visualize complex and mass relationship are compared, regarding data accessibility, data structure, size and density of data.

Jennifer Wong and I worked on the graphic-based interface design of a Collaborative Dive Computer. Current dive computers in the market are text-based and strictly designed to be used by single users. We developed it to design a collaborative dive computer integrated with one messaging system, the ability to view multiple divers’ status and the divers’ position, and an enhanced safety alert system.

In my project, working with Melanie, we present two novel visualization techniques to support the comparison of Gantt charts. First, we encode two Gantt charts in one view by overlapping them to show differences. Second, we designed a novel interactive visual technique, the “TbarView”, that allows users to compare multiple schedules within one single view. We evaluated the overlap and TbarView techniques via a user study.

What are Dandan’s plans after graduation?

I am working in HSBC currently, focusing on the improvement of the business system. After finish my master degree, I’d like to find a job in interaction design or information architecture. I believe the user-centered representation of data can significantly improve people’s productivity.

Want to learn more about Dandan?

More information about our lab in University of Victoria https://visid.cs.uvic.ca/.

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