Select Projects from Accela (2010 - 2009)

Accela Mobile Office

Led the initial design phase of a brand new touch enabled product targeted at field workers using tablet PCs. The product was designed to be used primarily at outdoors locations such as construction sites by building inspectors. A particular challenge was that the interface had to be designed in such a way that it could be interacted with via touch (if the device supported it) or mouse/stylus. This project involved ethnographic studies, persona creation, and mobile and touch UI design. After the initial phase, I was part of a team that worked on enhancing and refining the UI elements and patterns.

Accela Automation v7

Re-designed the UI of the flagship product with a focus on improving the navigation, interactions and the visual design. The previous interface had been created about 5 years ago and had several usability issues. I developed and conducted usability evaluations and focus groups to gather data for this effort. The update introduced several direct and rich interactions such as drag and drop, inline edits and auto-complete which greatly improved the usability and efficiency. The technology used was updated from JAVA to a combination of Silverlight and AJAX.

Section 508.c Compliance / Accessible Design

Played a pivotal role in making the products meet the 508.c accessibility guidelines by educating the engineering and product management teams of best practices and current trends. Assisted in conducting compliance reviews of the products and provided constant feedback to the developers throughout the accessibility effort. Designed alternate accessible interfaces for screens that had heavy interactivity so as to not compromise on the existing user experience.

Document and Plan Review Tools

Worked on document intake and review features with a focus on automating several manual steps. The feature enabled public users to submit plans and other documents online or offline for review by the agency. Once submitted, the documents were assigned, tracked, viewed and reviewed via the product. This process was highly collaborative and involved multiple users working on the same document simultaneously. To handle this, we created a layered versioning system which would keep track of internal and external versions.

Misc.

• Ported more administrator tools from the old interfaces to the new central framework
• Worked on applications for the iPhone and iPad
• Worked on a roadmap to establish a framework and direction for the next generation of the products