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Washington Jewish Museum

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Washington Jewish Museum

Goals

  • Build online museum to house the Washington State Jewish Historical Society’s hundreds of stories and artifacts to make them publicly available.
  • Understand audience.
  • Establish content types.
  • Find proper software applications to satisfy needs.

Process

  • Validated existing assumptions through user research and potential audience survey (received 220 responses).
  • Worked with stakeholders to assess society and audience needs, how those needs would benefit their audience, then constructed engagement strategy.
  • Developed personas, information architecture, and user experience architecture.

Challenges

  • Small budget.
  • Tying together multiple web systems.
  • Security and privacy.

Solution

  • Transformative WordPress site changed how the Washington State Jewish Historical Society tells its stories and interacts with the public.
  • Secondary museum-grade site with batch upload feature for housing digital artifacts.

I researched, designed and built site as a consultant for the Washington State Jewish Historical Society. You can download a version of the Content Strategy I created for sustaining the site here. In addition, as part of this project, I created fifty exhibit boards for the WSJHS\’s fundraising event with content that would eventually become a part of the museum. This is one of the many boards where I interviewed the subject and wrote the copy for the display.

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Emodo

Emodo

auto parts study

Emodo Auto Parts Retailer Foot Traffic Report

(Click the image above to read the report.)

Goals

This advertising arm of Ericsson uses aggregated and anonymized data to understand foot traffic patterns to clients and their clients’ competitors. For this report, we had the data that showed when people would visit a particular auto-parts store, and I worked with them to help understand who was going at these specific times and why. I then turned these insights into a white paper and report that can be used for potential clients.

Process

I collaborated with the vice president of advertising and one of their data scientists to assess the data and back up the insights, researched habits of auto-parts store shoppers on both the consumer and auto mechanic sides, then developed the story behind their visit patterns. I also learned way more than I ever wanted on how to start an old Porsche that’s been abandoned in a garage for decades. It was for science.

Challenges

The main challenge in a project like this is to make sure the story really does reflect the data, and not vice versa—which has been a challenge on similar data projects.

Results

The Emodo sales team is thrilled to have useful materials to show their products in action, and look forward to seeing more of these reports for different industries.

Other Emodo projects:

  • Multiple data reports
  • Messaging for Dealership Vehicle Intelligence (DVI) reports
  • Multiple one-page DVI infographics
  • Script for upcoming animated informational video
Microsoft logo

Gov Pod, the Digital Transformations Podcast

Gov Pod, the Digital Transformations Podcast

Gov Pod: A Microsoft podcast on AI and digital transformations

Goals

A Microsoft group that works with governments to help their digital transformations to cloud-based services needed additional materials for their clients and potential clients to understand how moving beyond legacy systems can help them in the next two to three years all the way to a decade from now. I worked with them to develop a series of podcasts that explain different ways artificial intelligence, blockchain and Internet of Things can positively affect how citizens interact with their governments.

Process

In collaboration with the team, I connected to and spoke with subject-matter experts in the fields of predictive technologies, social services, trust and privacy, and tax, then wrote scripts based on our conversations that created a smooth flow for listeners based on one episode per topic.

Challenges

The greatest challenges were logistical. Having spoken with people across the world, it was sometimes difficult to schedule calls because we were in such odd time zones.

Results

A member of the government team who once worked in radio provided the voice for my scripts. Her narration integrated with recordings from the subject-matter experts to create a content marketing series that we expect will provide great dividends for the team. Listen to both Seasons 1 and 2 here.

Other Microsoft projects:

RealityNext logo

RealityNext

RealityNext

As Co-founder of this startup in virtual reality and education, the journey of this organization was far more than building a user experience architecture or developing a content strategy for a client. I took part in every decision made to move us forward as we developed this market-making company.

Goals

To envision and build an education technology studio-lab where students would create and share immersive stories and games from inside a Virtual World by means of motion capture technologies and 3D tracking systems.

Process

Working with my co-founder to implement the vision, we acquired both human and financial resources to allow us to build a platform and hold workshops with students to test our assumptions and our methodology, get feedback, then iterate on what we learned.

Challenges

Finances were our biggest challenge—and ultimately the catalyst for our demise. We were self-funded for most of the life of the company, though we did successfully complete a Kickstarter campaign to help us develop some of our story-games based on workshops that our student groups completed.

Results

While we made the difficult decision to wind down operations in late 2018, we received accolades from other virtual reality companies for our innovation and had a working prototype that we made available as an open-source virtual reality world.

RealityNext\’s International Cloud Learning Sessions
RealityNext\’s Story-Game making workshops with middle and high school students

Check out one of our completed curricula. This one was based on Newton\’s First Law of Physics.