For our final project in User Interface Design at UC Berkeley's School of Information, my teammate Ben and I decided to redesign the user interface of BART ticket kiosks. These machines employ a medium-sized display with four physical buttons for user input on either side.

CURRENT SYSTEM

To buy a new ticket, a user inserts either cash or a credit/debit card into the machine, then chooses to either print a ticket of the value inserted ($20 for credit/debit) or subtract value in $1 or $0.05 increments to adjust the value of the ticket. Fares from the current station to all other stations are published separately on the kiosk. This is just painful!

REDESIGN

Instead of scrapping the current system and going with a touch-screen, Ben and I challenged ourselves by retaining the current eight-button physical input and focusing our redesign on the user interface software.

This decision has yielded exciting improvements. For example, users can purchase tickets to destinations they select on-screen instead of having to look up fares on a separate list. Riders can also buy tickets to either Bay Area airport with only 2 button presses. Preliminary user studies show that riders can buy tickets much more quickly with our prototype than with the existing kiosks.

PROTOTYPE

We built a a physical prototype of the ticket machine using an Arduino micro-controller to relay button-presses to the user interface built in Adobe Flex.

With increasing awareness of global climate change, the general public is realizing that individual choices to reduce power consumption can have positive impacts. Though there exist several real-time power monitoring appliances for individual households, very few encourage community participation and goal-setting.

DESIGN

PowerFall is an ambient, community-based fountain set in an apartment building lobby that monitors electricity use for each apartment vis-a-vis the building as a whole. The rate of water dripping from the elevated reservoir mirrors the building’s real-time electricity use.  At a glance, passers-by can perceive changes in electricity consumption by the changes in the fountain’s drip intensity.

As water falls, it lands into one of many glass collection tubes arranged around the inner edge of the glass enclosure: one per apartment unit.  The rate of dripping into a given tube corresponds to the electricity consumption rate of that unit.  As each drop falls into a tube, a subtle white light pulses from below, illuminating the tube and its water to better indicate which tube received the drop.  As water is collected throughout a day, the height of water in the tube will indicate the total electricity used.  Observing the collection tubes, residents can perceive both the real-time and daily total electricity consumption for each apartment.  Because the tubes are randomized and unlabeled, specific apartments’ tubes cannot be identified.

PROTOTYPE

We constructed a large (7’ x 4’) curved screen onto which we projected an interactive visualization of the fountain. This prototype was presented at the UC Berkeley School of Information and received very positive feedback from visiting members of the energy conservation and design communities. Read the PowerFall report.

Carbon capture and geologic storage (CCS) is one of the major technological options for reducing the amount of CO₂ we release into the atmosphere. By capturing CO₂ emitted by power plants and carefully storing it underground, we can help to mitigate the effects of global climate change.

Relative permeability is an essential factor in understanding the behavior of CO₂ in storage reservoirs. More and more labs around the world are beginning to measure relative permeability under various conditions, though there exists no central repository for these data.

DESIGN

The Relative Permeability Explorer (RPE) serves the community of scientists interested in CO₂ storage by interactively presenting a collection of relative permeability curves on the web. Sourced from researcher contributions and peer-reviewed journals, this online resource contains complete and sortable metadata — such as rock type, temperature, experimental method, etc. — for each set of relative permeability curves, making the tasks of finding and comparing curves very easy. Graphs animate smoothly from one data set to another, allowing users to perceive subtle differences in the curves. They can also be downloaded for offline viewing.

The Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) at Stanford University wanted to move its business cards away from the standard university template to a fresher, more personalized look.

DESIGN

My primary goal for the redesign was to visually prioritize the individual over the institution. This meant transforming the university seal from a focal decorative element into a large screened background image positioned partway off the card as well as moving the university signature to the cardinal red stripe on the left edge. This allows the individual’s name and contact information could become the focus of the card.

The name was set in Century Gothic in small caps to accentuate the single most important text on the card. The contact information was set in Optima for its elegant yet uncluttered appearance. Building, address, and phone numbers lines were grouped to enhance readability.

The Benson Lab is a new laboratory in the Energy Resources Engineering department at Stanford University, lead by Dr. Sally Benson. The lab conducts experimental and theoretical research in permanent storage of CO₂ underground as a means of preventing climate change.

DESIGN

Visually, my goals for lab website were to honor this field’s industrial roots in petroleum engineering while still making the site inviting and beautiful. I settled on a simple gray-black gradient theme with light text and luminescent green and orange accents.

Navigation was kept deliberately simple with a single level menu to access all parts of the site. Visitors can expect the usual array of sub-pages containing lab publications, an explanation of the lab’s research, and short biographies of its members. Less common features of this site are the “what’s new” section, that describes recent events and conferences in which the lab participated, as well as place to view lab-member presentations. Finally, the Benson Lab hosts the Relative Permeability Explorer, an interactive visualization of rock properties.