Lisa Barson studies computer science at UT Austin, with an interest in design. She is a Mentor for Code Orange and a Graphic Designer. She has worked for Spiceworks as a Software Engineer and Holaluz as a Business Development Engineer. This summer, she will be working with Microsoft as a Security Program Manager.
Under IBM mentorship, our team set out to design a way to utilize natural language processing and artificial intelligence to improve the travel experience, like a Jarvis for when you are on the go. We iterated through the design process as we did user interviews, scoped down the problem, defined personas, prototyped our design, and presented our final solution to IBM executives.
Through the interview process, our team was able to get a better understanding on particular pain points that our user was facing.
We started the interview process by getting the thoughts of a wide variety of users: college students, travel agents, business travelers. However, we eventually narrowed in on picking the corporate traveler as our main user as we saw them as an extreme user with some unique pain points. For example, corporate travelers default to known chains or room service instead of trying the local places, they deal with last minute changes, and they often meet with people that they would like to impress.
After picking the type of user that we wanted to focus on, we created two personas.
Hotel Howard is in his early 40s and travels for over 75% of his billable hours, earning him a platinum status on American Airlines. His major pain points are that he quickly just falls into routines and is not connected to the cities that he visits. Exploration Ellie is in her late 20s and travels once a month for work. She is always looking to explore the cities that she visits, but she struggles as all the information she needs is not consolidated in one place and it is hard to find recommendations personalized to her.
After understanding the needs of our users, we came up with our first prototype.
In our first attempt at a prototype, we tried to included all the solutions that we could think of. This is what our user input and output for our prototype looked like:
However, we quickly realized that it is best to prototype around a feature that is feasible and effective. Here is our final prototype, the Travel Genie!
The Travel Genie utilizes IBM Watson’s natural language processor as well as connected data from other platforms and accounts in order to quickly and effectively help you make the best decision for what to do next. The user must first answer questions about their hometown preferences, giving the Genie hints as to the user’s personality as well as determine which establishments are most liked by locals when other users come into town. Then, the user may prompt the Genie with questions like: “Where can I grab coffee on the way to my meeting?”, or the Genie may alert the user when it spots a place nearby, like: “You’re passing a great Polish deli nearby that [another corporate traveler] has reviewed on a previous trip. Would you like to make a stop?” Our intuitive UI is built in IBM’s Carbon Design language.
Through the design process, I came to really value the input that users gave to our team.
We realized that sometimes you design for a user that is completely different than yourself, so you need to approach the problem from their perspective. I also enjoyed creating personas that helped us imagine scenarios in which our product would be used. It was great working with IBM and creating the Travel Genie.
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Code Orange is an organization that aims to level the playing field in tech by starting early in underprivileged communities. I mentor a girl on the fundamentals of computer science as we build video games together.
Each Friday during the semester, I would meet up with my mentee and we would incrementally build our game through MIT's Scratch.
During our first semester together, I taught her about the how fun it can be to program as we built a jungle run game using while loops.
During our second semester together, she advanced to learning more code through code.org. We also built a Maze Runner game. After we finished working on the game, she presented it to her classmates and received a cerfticate for her work. I have really enjoyed working with her as she discovers the awesome power that computer science brings!
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During the summer of 2018, I interned at Spiceworks as a Software Engineer. Spiceworks is a company based in Austin that brings the IT world together by building personal experiences that connects IT pros and marketers with the resources they need to do their jobs.
I was placed on the Growth Squad, which focused on improving user engagement on their website. I used A/B testing through Google Optimize to create experiments of different website designs and then tested to see how users responded. I worked with a UX designer to design the new layouts through InVision. Then, I would code the changes using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If an experiment was successful, the design and code was pushed to production.
Close Project
Code Orange is an organization that aims to level the playing field in tech by starting early in underprivileged communities. I mentor a girl on the fundamentals of computer science as we build video games together.
Each Friday during the semester, I would meet up with my mentee and we would incrementally build our game through MIT's Scratch.
During our first semester together, I taught her about the how fun it can be to program as we built a jungle run game using while loops.
During our second semester together, she advanced to learning more code through code.org. We also built a Maze Runner game. After we finished working on the game, she presented it to her classmates and received a cerfticate for her work. I have really enjoyed working with her as she discovers the awesome power that computer science brings!
Close Project
Code Orange is an organization that aims to level the playing field in tech by starting early in underprivileged communities. I mentor a girl on the fundamentals of computer science as we build video games together.
Each Friday during the semester, I would meet up with my mentee and we would incrementally build our game through MIT's Scratch.
During our first semester together, I taught her about the how fun it can be to program as we built a jungle run game using while loops.
During our second semester together, she advanced to learning more code through code.org. We also built a Maze Runner game. After we finished working on the game, she presented it to her classmates and received a cerfticate for her work. I have really enjoyed working with her as she discovers the awesome power that computer science brings!
Close Project
Code Orange is an organization that aims to level the playing field in tech by starting early in underprivileged communities. I mentor a girl on the fundamentals of computer science as we build video games together.
Each Friday during the semester, I would meet up with my mentee and we would incrementally build our game through MIT's Scratch.
During our first semester together, I taught her about the how fun it can be to program as we built a jungle run game using while loops.
During our second semester together, she advanced to learning more code through code.org. We also built a Maze Runner game. After we finished working on the game, she presented it to her classmates and received a cerfticate for her work. I have really enjoyed working with her as she discovers the awesome power that computer science brings!
Close Project
