Doug Kuzenski

Hello, and welcome to my experience portfolio. This page is meant to exemplify my skills and past activities, and explain how that maps to important career-related objectives.
Click here for more information about me and my other interests
Note: this page was last updated in 2008.

user research & strategy

The Master of Science in Information Management program at the University of Washington emphasizes balancing the needs of people within an organization and the needs of an organization as a whole. I take pride in the work I have done in my studies which have most effectively sought out a meaningful solution from both the perspective of the users and of the business.

As the beginning stages of my iterative-design mobile-web project, detailed below, I conducted both non-obtrusive observation and contextual interviews of my user group. These gave me valuable insights into the type of information needs present in a shopping mall setting. I also conducted a review of the various issues at stake for the organization.

In developing background information to feed into the construction of an information security policy, I was part of a team which evaluated the current susceptibility of our school to social engineering. This included research into how students currently dispose of their personal information items, how this could be leveraged against them, and procedures that could be put into place to prevent this. Our understanding of the information users gave us invaluable insights into how policy can be adjusted to meet the needs of the situation.

Three other projects involved components of user analysis before designing new systems. One, a web service to support consumer-empowerment by giving them meaningful information, began with a thorough analysis into the ways people use the Internet to shop, including interviews and observation. Another, in designing a system for a real-world organization, we analyzed and interviewed stakeholders to find communication needs. Finally, I'm currently conducting user interviews for a project to meet information the needs of users in a special collections library.

Understanding the tasks, and mindset, of the members of an organization continues to be the most challenging and the most rewarding aspect for me in dealing with information systems. The varied personalities and needs within an organization bring about the best opportunities for a designer to create meaningful innovation.

teacher's assistantship

While attending the University of Washington as an Information Management graduate student, I also worked part-time as a Teacher's Assistant. This position gave me new responsibilities, and the opportunity to expand my knowledge: both technical and organizational. These responsibilities generally included creating and administering the course website, giving lectures, and guiding student's technical learning during lab-periods.

A class tied to the Informatics bachelor's degree, Web Tools and Development required me to instruct on the fundamentals of building dynamic data-driven websites. This included topics such as ASP.NET, Social Applications, Intellectual Property, and a lecture I designed and delivered on Design and Usability. I was also closely involved with transitioning the course-content from Open-Source, LAMP-based, to the Microsoft stack. While also clarifying my understanding of Microsoft-based development, this allowed me to gain a higher-level comparative view of the two web application camps. Finally, as the students completed team-built dynamic websites, using technologies of their choosing, I acted in the role of advisor and project coordinator. By enforcing scheduled build dates, and reviewing versions of code, I gave feedback and criticism that guided the development of eight websites from their formative stages to final-builds.

Assisting in the teaching of Database Management and Information Retrieval has brought about new challenges that I am applying my knowledge to overcome. Once again, transitioning the course content from LAMP to the Microsoft stack proved difficult, but I was also tasked with creating weekly quizzes and assignments, to evaluate and quantify the progress of the students. While working more closely with students, I was able to understand their individual strengths, and attempt to instruct them accordingly. Finally, both classes I have assisted in have had the same lecturer, Sanjiv Sharma, who holds a senior role at Microsoft Corporation. By working closely with him I've gained valuable insights into the business aspects of software development and project management.

Through two quarters of assisting with Information Structures and XML, I began with the undergraduate Informatics students the first quarter, and progressed to assisting with the masters level course. This course focused on such fundamental principles as how to break information down semantically into descrete units, store them hierarchically, and then establish meaningful access structures. These access structures included associations, hierarchies, and sequences. The majority of my time was assisting students, who come to the course with a range of computer skills, to work with the tools chosen for the class. Specifically, we created dynamic content-driven sites built on top of XML, as defined by a common XSD schema, and then displayed with the XSL transformation standard, all within the XMLSpy IDE. Rapidly bringing students from limited HTML knowledge to an advanced grasp of XML concepts, including complicated schema rules and XPath expressions, proved to be an interesting and rewarding challenge.

dynamic website project

After learning the basics of PHP/MySQL from classes with Seattle Central Community College, in an attempt to expand my knowledge in these technologies, I created my own data driven website. The premise of this website (staticnothing.com) was to collect the various links to the many locations on the web where free, legal, media is available, and organize them in a meaningful way.

Hand-coded in PHP generated XHTML, the site operates atop a relational database. This MySQL database holds information about media websites, including attributes such as approximate size and content type. This allows a user to view the information ordered by any of these parameters on the Links page by way of PHP generated SQL scripts. Also, site reviews and individual content links are associated with their related link detail page, appearing in context there. All formatting is done through a site-wide CSS style-sheet, making use of a DIV oriented layout.

Designed with a password-protected administrator's panel, a user can add content by filling out forms, without any need to interact with the site's internal XHTML. This allows for a fluid experience for both the visitor and the administrator. Also, by creating my own PHP-generated RSS script, I was able to customize how my site's content was displayed in RSS aggregators; specifically, I combined all reviews and content links into a single feed.

iterative-design mobile-web project

Under the guidance of Dr. Jacob Wobbrock, I took part in a team design of a mobile web application solution to shopping mall information problems. Over the course of a three-month term, while engaging in an HCI Design Methods course, our team completed several iterations of our design, ending in a high-fidelity prototype.

Using the principles of Participatory Design, including Design Ethnography and Contextual Inquiry, our team evaluated the information needs of visitors to an area shopping mall in the context in which it is used. As our guide, we followed the writings of J. Blomberg, H. Beyer, and K. Holtzblatt. After gathering our observations, we conducted several ideation sessions, making use of such tools as structured brainstorming, card sorting, sketching (right), and persona development.

Next, our team separately developed two fast paper-prototypes (left) of our interactive design's interface. We envisioned a mobile application that could be used inside of a shopping mall to dynamically locate products, stores, and other users of the system. By storyboarding our use-cases, we were able to envision how the final product might be used and deal with problems such as navigation and usability without the overhead of a high-fidelity prototype. Upon completion of our paper-prototypes, we conducted usability tests and heuristic analysis on our design. This allowed us to combine the best features of each initial prototype and repeat several User-Centered Design iterations.

Finally, I was proud to assume the role of the group's high-fidelity interactive prototype creator. Under a tight deadline, I developed a PHP web application to simulate the experience of using the mobile device we had designed. You can interact with the live final prototype here (photo right). This prototype reflected the core components of our design, including navigation and simulated content.

Our class had the privilege of presenting our designs to a panel from various local high-profile technology companies. During our presentation, I helped explain our research findings, and describe the rationale for our final design. By demoing the high-fidelity prototype while audience members were also interacting with it, we were able to communicate our concept and prompted an interesting question and answer session afterwards.

faceted classification project

As the final product of an Organization of Information and Resources course, I created a logical system for classifying documents of a given area, or systematic bibliography. By utilizing several technologies and theories of classification, I gained valuable insight into methods of organization of information.

This project began by conducting subject analysis on my set of documents, generating a list of subject terms. These were then analyzed for logical groupings, which informed my faceted classification scheme. In this process, I largely used the writings of Patrick Wilson, Eric J. Hunter, and S. R. Ranganathan. Finally, I applied my faceted classification scheme's controlled vocabulary to my documents, which generated a systematic bibliography. During my project, I made use of such cataloging software as Zotero, EndNote and Connotea, while manipulated my data in the RDF, XML, and Dublin Core description standards.

My final paper can be downloaded here in Microsoft Word format. Caution, it includes the generated RDF and XML code, and is therefore quite long. I believe the most instructive part of this project was the requirement to justify the classification decisions I made. This made me take what are often abstract connections and explicitly state them.

past experiences

Many of my previous experiences, although not directly related to the world of information management, play a big part into who I am today, and have given me insight into how to be more productive and meaningful in my work.

I spent six years in the United States Navy. During that time, I completed what is considered the most difficult enlisted school in the military, a two-year navy nuclear power training program, finishing in the top 5% of my class. This taught me the benefits of hard work, working collaboratively, and attention to detail. After being assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, I worked hard to achieve whenever the opportunity allowed. Qualifying to both operate a nuclear reactor and to operate the ship-wide electrical distribution system, I understand the mission-critical aspects of a position where many people depend on my decisions. Also, during the time I spent as a program manager in charge of maintenance on primary reactor plant electrical components, I learned how to organize work, people, and resources. Also, by getting my undergraduate degree while still in the Navy, I learned many important things about budgeting my time and setting personal priorities. Most importantly, what I learned in the Navy that applies to every situation in life is how to work with people from many backgrounds, who all approach a problem in different ways. Being able to understand the mindset of people around me helps me work in a team to accomplish our goals.

Also, while awaiting the commencement of my graduate program at the University of Washington, I took the opportunity to take a few terms at the local community college in various information technology related classes. Though this did not lead to any portfolio-worthy projects, it did give me a firm grounding in the development side of IT. These courses, such as C#, SQL Server, PHP/MySQL, database design, and webpage design helped to prepare me for my future career in information management.

other projects

As a past graduate student of Information Management at the University of Washington, I was challenged daily to achieve excellence in design, information organization, and understanding of user needs and context.

One of my past projects, in association with a Construction of Indexing Languages course, was a team creation of an indexing and search thesaurus based on documents and user needs in a given area. Our area, digital security, provided us with a wide range of entry terms to our controlled vocabulary, involving computers, types of exploits, and types of counter-measures. Our terms, carefully selected to meet user needs through a domain analysis, were then given hierarchical associations, and other access structures, to enable indexing of documents in this area. Controlled vocabularies and indexing terms are an important aspect of Information Architecture, especially when designing a large-scale website which includes many types of documents.

An interesting project, which showcased skills both in information gathering, storage, and retrieval was an internship information gathering site. This site is built entirely on an XML document, validated on an XSD, and transformed with XSL to showcase meaningful information. When the user enters the URL of a target internship, a PHP script retrieves the pertinent information. This script then manipulates the XML DOM, inserting the data in a formated and semantically meaningful way. The user is then able to browse their selection of internship based on several facets, and organizational schemes, including chronological, by area, or hierarchically. The user is then able to further manipulate these entries by marking them as "applied to" or deleting them, which edits the underlying XML.

While working as an intern, I completed the development and design for an automated testing suite. This suite was built using the PHP Simple Test platform, which allows for scripts to be run against dynamic websites, to ensure a continuity of feature sets. This system allowed development of a sophisticated content management system to continue with fewer errors and a faster speed than would otherwise have been possible.

Beyond regular school activities, I am also pursued various outside activities which helped further my individual learning. For example, my attendance was selected to be sponsored by the Washington State Director of Information Services to the governing.com conference in May of 2008. This conference dealt with the many social and political issues surrounding the development of public works IT projects. Also, I was elected by my peers to be a founding member and Vice President of the Association of Information Management Students. This organization represents the needs and goals of the 100+ current Information Management students at the University of Washington, as well as all incoming and alumni. This position has proved to be a good opportunity to develop my skills of understanding the needs of the groups I have been selected to represent. AIMS continues into their second year, planning ways to advocate for students needs in the Information School.

about this page

This page, designed using TextWrangler v2.3 on an Apple G5, makes use of a XHTML/CSS to form a traditional two-column navigation/content layout. All images were edited using Adobe Photoshop CS to be optimized for the web.

Hat image courtesy of The Hat Box, for all your Australian Hat needs. Trendy rounded corner effect courtesy of about.com. University of Washington course webpages © UW 2008. Thank you for visiting my portfolio.