education
- Master of Design
- Carnegie Mellon University May '08, Pittsburgh PA
- Interaction Design
- Honors Bachelor of Science
- University of Toronto May '06, Toronto Canada
- Specialist, Artificial Intelligence
- Major, Computer Science
- Minor, Linguistics
experience
- Interaction designer
- The Mattress Factory Art Museum, Pittsburgh, PA
- Jan '08 – present
- Part of a five member team responsible for redesigning the experience at the museum from three different perspectives: through the visitor, the artist, and the museum employees.
- Service design researcher
- IBM T.J.Watson Research Center
- May–Aug '07, Hawthorne NY
- Developed new ways for visualizing service engagements from the customer perspective to include customer satisfaction and emotion.
- Educated and advocated design in the corporate setting.
Work has been accepted to the DMI Education Conference 2008.
- Interface design researcher
- Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center & CMU
- June–Aug '06, Pittsburgh PA
- Researched, tested, and redesigned the interface for the cognitive tutor authoring tools. The final redesign allowed for a more productive, friendly, and fulfilling experience for the user.
- Cognitive development researcher
- University of Toronto Cognitive Development Lab
- Sept '04–Sept '05, Toronto Canada
- Designed and performed research experiments for three to five year olds.
- Developed skills in psychological research methods.
- Learned to do research with families and young children.
selected projects
- Motorola Mobile Media Life
- In collaboration with Motorola
- January–May '07
- Team strategist in developing a product in collaboration with Motorola by fusing community and multimedia that will help people become skilled at enjoying, producing, and interacting with rich media in their environment.
- Presented final project to Motorola in Chicago, IL
- UPMC Orthopedic Patient Communication redesign
- In collaboration with Microsoft and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (South Side campus)
- January–May '07
- Lead a team to research and design a communication hub for the orthopedic unit at UPMC. Explored issues of communication, trust, privacy, activities and relationships surrounding the orthopedic patient experience at the hospital.
- enLight digital music player for elders
- October–December '06
- Lead a team to design, develop and prototype a digital music player for the active elder population. Explored issues of emotional connection between people and music, and how music can make people feel better about the social roles they enact.
- MusicTrack mobile event finder application
- September–October '06
- Lead a team to design, develop, and prototype a mobile application to aid users in finding musical events in the local area. Explored the issues in designing for a mobile platform as well as finding opportunistic needs in a mobile context.
publications
- Spraragen, S. and Carrie Chan. "Service Blueprinting: When Customer Satisfaction Numbers Aren't Enough". DMI Education Conference 2008
methods
- user research
- competitive analysis
- brainstorming
- persona development
- contextual inquiry
- interviewing
- surveys
- concept development
- participatory design
- scenario development
- storyboarding
- wireframing
- prototyping
- usability testing
- videosketching
tools
- Flash
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- InDesign
- AfterEffects
- Dreamweaver
- Actionscript
- Java
- HTML
- CSS
- Microsoft Office
- Mac/Windows