Portfolio

Here is some of the most interesting UX and HCI-related work that I’ve done in the past few years.

BumpTop Multi-touch Support

BumpTop is a 3D desktop replacement that allows you to interact with your computer in a more natural way. I joined the company right after the launch of version 1.0, and lead the implementation of BumpTop’s multi-touch support. I was a key contributor to the design of the multi-touch gestures, and a co-inventor on a patent submission. I was also the lead developer (working with an intern) on the implementation of all our multi-touch support. Here’s a quick demo of some of the BumpTop multi-touch features:

I also created some infographics that describe all of the BumpTop multi-touch gestures (click for the full set of graphics):

BumpTop Multi-touch Gestures

A Study of Tabbed Browsing Among Mozilla Firefox Users

For my master’s thesis in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Toronto, I performed a field study which looked at how and why people use tabs. I published a full paper based on this work at CHI 2010 in Atlanta. You may also want to check out my annotated slides from the talk.

For the study, I wrote tlogger, a Firefox extension for capturing click-stream web browsing logs. It has been used in several other academic projects, including TabViz, Multitasking bar (PDF), and Detecting drive-by-downloads using human behavior patterns.

The XOTablet Project

In the spring of 2008, I did some work on the One Laptop per Child XO laptop. The XO comes with a built-in pressure-sensitive graphics tablet, but it was not supported by any of the built-in software. The first goal was to modify the Sugar API so applications could use the tablet as an input device. The second goal was to help answer an interaction design problem: how could the short, wide graphics tablet be mapped to the display for full-screen drawing? I experimented with three different user interfaces for freehand drawing, and evaluated them in a small user study.

In January 2010, a company called Ten One Design released Inklet, an application which lets you use your MacBook trackpad as a pen tablet. It uses a very similar (but much more refined) approach.

FriendFrame: Visualizing Facebook Photos

In late 2007, I was experimenting with applications for ambient displays. As digital displays get cheaper and more ubiquitous, we can start to use them for more subtle purposes, e.g. as decoration or architectural features. I wanted to explore how the Facebook news feed could be displayed in a more ambient way. Through a survey, I learned that primary thing people were interested in seeing on Facebook was friends’ photos. Hence, I built FriendFrame: an ambient visualization of Facebook photos.

FriendFrame could run as a screensaver or on a dedicated ambient display. It pulls your friends’ photos from Facebook and displays them in a “polaroid waterfall”. It was built in Adobe Flex, with a bit of Python to access the Facebook API. If you happen to be interested in the source code, you can send me an email at pat at [my last name] .com.

Blog

I’ve been blogging here since 2006 on programming, usability, and HCI. Here are some of my most popular articles:

Sometimes I also post sketches and mockups for UI ideas. For example: