Students work in interdisciplinary teams with an industry sponsor to produce a working prototype that serves as a proof of concept of a novel service or product idea. This overview lists some of our students' projects.
Team Metis is working with Collab, a European Multimedia Contact Center provider, on its OneSupervisor solution.
We want to understand how existing technology aids supervisors’ decision-making process, so that we can improve the solution’s clarity and efficiency for managing floor operations and communicating performance.
Team Explora is working with the tourism company More4You to build an enhanced experience for tourists visiting their website visitingmadeira.com.
The team is seeking to understand the motivations and needs of tourists to design an innovative experience that will anticipate and exceed expectations through a comprehensive set of digital and offline tools.
Team Elementary is working with Exictos, a company that specializes in Information Technology and development of software solutions for the banking, insurance, retail, and utilities sectors.
We want to understand how people interact with money so that we may build a contextually-aware consumer banking experience.
Team Pearl Collective is working with Porto Bay Hotels & Resorts a group that owns and operates nearly a dozen 4 star and 5 star properties in Portugal and Brazil.
The team wants to study hospitality services in order to understand how guest needs are identified and addressed so that they can create a more personalized experience for each individual guest during their stay.
Team Push is working for Play (Poland) looking to understand how families with primary school age children interact and communicate in order to design an engaging service that facilitates family relationships.
PLAY is a mobile network operator based in Poland. PLAY’s key competitive advantages have been based so far on best on the market value for money B2C voice and data offer for individual customers.
Team WavesFM is working with RootIO (Uganda). Their goal is to research the diversity of the Ugandan diaspora in order to determine how Ugandans abroad can use technology to contribute to their homeland in ways other than personal financial support (remittances).
Many of those in the Ugandan diaspora first move to Europe or America for increased higher education opportunities; they are eager to share their experiences with others in Uganda and advise them on the pros and cons of studying abroad. WavesFM is building a mentor matching platform to pair prospective students in Uganda with diaspora members who have been through the college application process in other countries. We aim to open the doors to even more promising Ugandan students who want guidance through the schooling, moving, and career processes, but feel like they don't have anyone to go to for help.
RootIO aims to rebuild radio in the era of wifi and peer production, for and with rural communities in the global south. We start with “microstations” powered only by small, inexpensive FM transmitters and Android smartphones. For the 90% of the world’s population that doesn’t live in a handful of rich countries, radio is how most people get their news and information.
Team Spark is working with Wow!Systems.
Wow! Systems is a creative interactive multimedia agency and software house based in Funchal. They approached the Masters of Human Computer Interaction students to develop a project that focuses on promoting mental well-being through today's technologies. Team Spark will present findings from their research on daily routines and social network behaviors, which they have done over the course of the semester, as well as visions for creating prototypes during next semester.
Team Frontier is working with Outsystems, a software enterprise company based in Lisbon, Portugal. Our main objective for this project is to understand citizen developers’ needs, so that we can design an intuitive and usable development environment for them to create an application. Citizen developers are corporate professionals who are non-programmers but have experience with business intelligence tools.
The Museum of Electricity in Madeira in Funchal, known as the Casa da Luz, is a unique space for enriching interaction with science and history for Madeiran citizens and visitors alike. Team Power House was set with the task to re-envision the first floor exhibition space to make it a more engaging and accessible experience.
Creating a compelling, engaging space is a wide open project. We set out on this journey applying a broad arsenal of unique research methods. We had two primary research goals. The first goal was to understand the domain--electricity, and more specifically, electricity of Madeira. The second goal was to understand the medium of communication-an interactive exhibit space.
Through an extensive, multifaceted research process, we gained rich insights which we are using to shape the content narrative and exhibit design of the second floor. This publication takes you through this journey and communicates our vision and process thus far.
Uniecho is working with Novabase and University of Madeira M-ITI in order to help Portuguese Universities build an alumni culture. We conducted a massive amount of research to understand multiple stakeholders. This research has helped us unearth our insights and have them grounded. These insights will act as a guide to help us create design ideas to solve the needs of the users and guide our designs throughout the remainder of the capstone.
InContext is the culmination of research, design, and assessment spanning two semesters. Four graduate Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) students from Carnegie Mellon University, in partnership with Universityof Madeira, formed a team to carry out an end-to-end HCI final project.
Team Promethean's client was Logica, a global technical consulting firm, which assigned them to investigate the domain of power management and control at Portugal's energy utility, EDP.
The purpose of this project is to show operators relevant information at the time it is most useful, to contextualize disparate data into coherent structures that can be used to solve problems, and transform text-based information into dynamic information visualizations. Improving the kind and quality of data make the overwhelming amount of data at the nation’s energy distributor more useful and customizable to the needs of operators instead of being restricted by rigid software.
Walkthrough
We structured InContext around 3 basic interactions: dashboard, grid view and map view. Both the grid and map views offer details about clusters on the dashboard. Users navigate to detailed views by clicking on a cluster. By default when they select a grid-based cluster (circles), they are taken to the grid view, and when a user clicks a geo-based cluster (triangles) they are taken to the map view. Users can then switch between these views at any time without going back to the dashboard.
In all three interaction spaces we included a timeline allowing users to scroll through time and see how events unfold. Although the timeline only allows for past navigation, the system is highly malleable and can be developed to predict how and when events are likely occur. This can be done by profiling patterns in past data and extracting predictive functions for events with similar patterns.
Parque Natural da Madeira and Team Euphorbia joined efforts in order to research, understand and implement new ways of increasing the population’s awareness for environmental problems. The goal of this project is to influence local population and visitors to choose environmental best practices that will protected the ecosystem’s biodiversity and will guarantee economic sustainability.
The Solution
Team Euphorbia designed a learning experience that includes a web app as well as a set of playing cards.
The App
Be Eco is a journey where we accompany a character throughout his day of work. During his journey he chooses actions to perform.
Based on the action, an animation forwards in time and shows the consequences.
The score affects the catch we get at the end.
Team Pandere created RetailDetail, a virtual crossroads for companies users, and their friends. It allows companies to engage customers through new channels, track content that matters to customers, and create experiences that impress.
This project is a colloborative effort between six masters students in the Masters of Human-Computer Interaction (MHCI) program at Carnegie Mellon University and the University Of Madeira, and Collab.
With the arrival and spread of social networks comes benefits and challenges for both individuals and businesses. While businesses have been able to take advantage of social networks to improve their visibility, marketing efforts, and customer support, they also have had to tackle the difficulty of reacting to and managing negative publicity that disseminates extremely quickly, and is difficult to react to and control. The overall goal was tackling the challenge of social networks for technology companies like Collab.
It allows users to seek first hand experience with products and services, get feedback from those that they trust, and connect with companies in more meaningful and individual ways. RetailDetail is a web application within Facebook that allows businesses to create and share content with users, as well as collaborate with users to make the most informed purchasing decision possible. Users can not only collect and organize their own research on products and services within open spaces called workspaces, but also can connect and collaborate with their Facebook friends by sharing their workspaces. The overall goal of the application is to seamlessly integrate the processes of product content collection, organization, collaboration and sharing. The core purpose of RetailDetail is to search for products and services, collect and organize information about those products and services, share that information with friends and offer help to friends who shared their information. Users will often begin their experience in RetailDetail by searching for the products or services that interest them. By doing this, they will be able to find companies that offer relevant information about the users’ search queries. This information is presented to users as company storefronts. Users can then pull this information into their own personal workspaces that they have created, and organize and cluster this information in whichever way they would like. Finally, users can share their workspaces with their friends on Facebook, as well as offer help and give guidance to their friends that have shared their own workspaces.
The Portal is a tablet application that allows enterprise clients to manage their Portugal Telecom services away from their desktop computer.
This project is a colloborative effort between five masters students in the Masters of Human-Computer Interaction (MHCI) program at Carnegie Mellon University and the University Of Madeira, and PT SI.
The Challenge
Portugal Telecom (PT), the largest telecom company in Portugal, has distinct looks and identities for each of the brands that make up its internet, landline, mobile, and IP TV divisions. As of now, business subscribers have to log in a separate portal to access each service. In order to improve a customer’s experience in accessing services online, PT charged the team with developing an enterprise portal that brings the brand identities together into one cohesive and uniform site. PT was doing parallel development of an enterprise portal, but wanted to harness the team’s expertise in conducting user research to bring fresh ideas and the voice of PT’s customers to the table.
The Solution
The Portal is a tablet application that allows enterprise clients to manage their Portugal Telecom services away from their desktop computer. It is an integrated entryway for enterprise clients to manage bills, usage and repair requests—as well as purchase new services and equipment. With the Portal application, enterprise clients can perform these important telecom management functions at a meeting, in a colleague’s office, or anywhere their job takes them. User testing allowed the team to validate ideas about the best requests to automate in the PT Portal. Some functions the team wanted to include go far beyond the capabilities of PT or the customer’s equipment or systems, and would not likely be implemented. Thus, the team decided to pare down some functionality, and keep what is more possible for inclusion in a rollout of the application. The final design offers an easy, three-step request process; transparency about requests, PT processes, and charges; and an intuitive organization of a manager’s services. Telecom managers will call a client manager less as they become accustomed to completing bill disputes, repair orders, and buying services in three steps in the portal. Managers will see that they can easily check the status of requests in the Portal, and no longer need to call customer service or the client manager with a ticket number. The Portal frees client managers to focus on the tasks like negotiation of a complex service package, which truly require their expertise, and are facilitated by a more personal interaction with the client. As iPads are being rapidly adopted into businesses, the PT Portal provides a novel and exciting way for managers to interact with PT. Telecom managers are no longer bound to their desks to do their work. They can take the Portal app’s powerful functionality to a meeting, to a colleague’s desk, to another business site or anywhere their job takes them. The PT Portal represents the future of business telecom management.
Team Immersion presents FlyTalk: a unique mobile application to help you through your journey. Based on a year of research FlyTalk is designed to provide manageability of airport information while giving personalized and a way to communicate with other travelers as well as airport officials.
This project is a colloborative effort between five masters students in the Masters of Human-Computer Interaction (MHCI) program at Carnegie Mellon University and the University Of Madeira, and Logica’s Service Design Lab.
The Challenge
Creating a context-aware application that would improve the experience of air travelers.
The Solution
FlyTalk is a mobile application designed to provide travelers just the right information, at just the right time. To meet the needs of the traveler, FlyTalk provides three levels of information: a base level of existing information, a middle level of context-aware information, and top level of communication and personalized help.
Base Level: Existing Information
The base level consists of relatively static information that all travelers need. Examples include flight number, boarding time, a map of the airport, and a list of services.
Middle Level: Context-Aware Information
The middle level provides context-aware information that updates dynamically based on the traveler’s time and location. Examples include a personalized itinerary, a customized map showing the traveler’s route through the airport, and dynamic walk and wait times.
Top Level: Personalized Help
Finally, the top level gives travelers a voice when they need personal attention. FlyTalk allows travelers to propose questions to their flightmates or official entities in order to have help for their specific situations. FlyTalk consolidates these three levels of information into one smart design. As a result, FlyTalk addresses the main challenges that travelers face.
InDroid Team worked with PT Inovação.
Life is busy for working parents. Staying on top of work and family life is hard. You do your best and you do whatever it takes to be there for your kid. But how do you stay up-to-date with your kids progress at school?
Introducing School Connect, an Android application developed in collaboration with teachers and parents.
Team Disco is working with Vodafone.
The brief is to design a next-generation collaborative environment. This will consist of developing software for fixed and mobile devices to be used in a meeting room, as well as on fixed and mobile devices that are remotely connected.
The result was Hootenanny, a shared workspace.
Team Collective's project centered around COLLAB’s OnePBX, a powerful multi-tenant SIP based IP PBX solution. The project demonstrates the results from a user-centered design which focused on real life customer experiences to address the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce.
OneTouch represents a revolution in unified communications. OneTouch empowers the mobile workforce by providing a usercentric mobile experience that puts you in control, whether your at work or at home. OneTouch’s design went beyond current solutions to address the needs of the mobile workforce. Whether your on a call or checking emails, OneTouch’s mobile experience puts everything you need, OneTouch away. OneTouch connects you to the people and places that matter to you – whether it is business or personal. OneTouch’s design was inspired by roadwarriors to meet the demands of a workforce on the go. With OneTouch, your always in control of your mobile communications.
