Featured Project: outWord
outWord is the first game created by Phonagle, the company I co-founded with three other SI students upon winning a highly competitive student start-up opportunity created by RPM Ventures. This innovative new game uses the real world as its gameboard, allowing players to compete against their neighbors and friends to find letters and build words. This isn't for couch potatoes: you must be near the letters to get them, and that often involves walking. It's out now for the iPhone, and the response has been very positive, with thousands of players and hundreds of thousands of words submitted worldwide. Check it out on the AppStore!
I headed up the user experience research and interaction design, developing early sketches, testing them, and rapidly iterating on them.
Phonagle was one of the founding member companies of the TechArb, a student start-up incubator that provides a collaborative environment for a number of newly minted entrepreneurs at the University of Michigan. The members of the TechArb, along with RPM Ventures, successfully lobbied (both directly and through our achievements) the University's Center for Entrepreneurship to assume support of the incubator into the fall, and beyond.
Skills: contextual interviews and analysis, interaction design, user and market research, mobile game development, entrepreneurship
Summer 2009 - present