One year on, what have we learned? Join us for Interaction 22 ↗
05 Feb, 5:55 pm
06 Feb, 1:55 am
06 Feb, 9:55 am
10 min
The COVID-19 pandemic has given us plenty to be angry about: deaths, illness, unemployment, closures, and for many: a life unrecognizable from before. During these times of uncertainty and fear, it can be helpful to focus one's energy on things within one's control: wearing a mask, washing one’s hands, and maintaining social distance. For some, that also means helping to build a mobile contact tracing app. Watch Part 1 in a two-part series, during which two of the volunteers working on New York State's COVID Alert NY mobile app talk about its design. In Part 2, a third volunteer will discuss the approaches to successive evaluation in the team’s iterative design process.
Volunteers at Tech:NYC
Alex Hurworth is an Interaction Design Team Leader at Bloomberg, where she specializes in mobile apps. Alex Hurworth was part of a multi-disciplinary team of volunteers that collaborated with New York State to design the COVID Alert NY mobile contact tracing app for its residents.---Fahd Arshad is a UX Strategist in the Office of the CTO at Bloomberg, where his mandate is to partner with various groups across Bloomberg to guide more visionary UX efforts. He is currently focused on the company’s UI Infrastructure, its accessibility efforts, and Bloomberg Connects, a partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies. Fahd was part of a multi-disciplinary team of volunteers that collaborated with New York State to design the COVID Alert NY mobile contact tracing app for its residents.
Volunteer at Tech:NYC
Bonnie John is a Senior User Experience Designer in the Financial Products UX Design team at Bloomberg, where she works on products for financial data scientists. With a BEng and MS in Mechanical Engineering (The Cooper Union and Stanford, respectively) she designed data- and tele-communication systems at Bell Labs until she wanted to know whether the systems she was designing would be easy for people to learn and use. Quitting her high-paying engineering job, she obtained a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, where she stayed as a professor for 22 years and was one of the founders of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in CMU's School of Computer Science. Wanting to spend her later years as one of the little old ladies walking her dogs in Central Park, she moved to NYC while working for IBM Research in Yorktown and later joined Bloomberg, where she has the best commute in the world, strolling through the Central Park Zoo. Bonnie was part of a multi-disciplinary team of volunteers that collaborated with New York State to design the COVID Alert NY mobile contact tracing app for its residents.