Design Student of the Month - Salpy Elizabeth Kelian

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 May 2009 is Salpy Elizabeth Kelian! Congratulations!! Let's hear from Salpy.

Who’s Salpy?

Hi, I’m Salpy and I live in Toronto. For the past eight months I have attended Sheridan College’s Interactive Multimedia Program (IMM). I decided to go back to school for IMM after working as an instructional designer as I wanted to learn a lot more about programming for interactive multimedia. Though I had taken computer science as an elective during my undergraduate degree, I found IMM a lot more hands on and applicable to online material. Interestingly, this isn’t my first career. I’ve also worked as a researcher, and am a certified secondary school science teacher.

What cool stuff is Salpy doing?

The largest project I worked on during this school year was my second term client project. It was a group project in which I was the project manager. Our challenge was to create a Microsoft Surface mock up in Flash for Royal Caribbean International (RCI). It was up to us to research RCI in order to create an application for Microsoft Surface that would attract cruisers to choose RCI over its competition.

We decided on creating a Virtual Concierge that featured many of the key attributes of Microsoft Surface such as object recognition, multi-user and direct interaction. As it was a Flash mockup, we couldn’t quite emulate the multi-touch aspect. In order to compensate, we still had the scaling and rotational features of each window in place to emulate the feel of a Surface application. For user testing, we had members of the class along with the client try out the application as the work progressed. It was extremely helpful having class members try the application as they had no idea as to what the application was for. Having them use it intuitively and be able to figure out the purpose behind it quickly let us know that our application met its goal of intuitive user interface.

For an overview of the project please see https://imminfusion.wordpress.com/about/. To see the Flash mockup in action https://www.salpy.ca/content/infusion/index.html.

What are Salpy’s plans after graduation?

My goal is to learn a lot more about creating functionality that provides users with a great interactive multimedia experience. As the newest member of Jam3Media (Jam3Media.com), I’ll definitely be meeting my goal of working on highly interactive, multimedia rich sites that feature an excellent user experience.

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