Sarah Sinclair's Individual Contribution Page

As Design Lead and program manager on the Plant Operations Smartphone Tracker (POST) team, I will work with a small team of developers to create and iteratively refine upon an app that facilitates data collection from AguaClara plants in Honduras. Current data collection efforts rely upon operators' sending a specifically formatted text message each day, and are not reliable, both in frequency and in quality of data. The POST team will simplify this process through the creation of an Android app, which will additionally offer data visualization, trend predictions, and Bluetooth interfacing with turbidimeters to add value to operators. As a part of this team, I will work to manage feature lists, timelines, and team expectations, while contributing to wireframes and feature specifications to ensure our designs adequately meet the needs of Honduran plant operators. I will lead an interview-based feedback collection process with field engineers and plant operators in order to improve the quality of our product. I will lead field tests using smartphones deployed to Honduran operators as a part of this process.

Again as a part of the Water Treatment Technology Selection Guide team, I made significant progress in making the site scalable and accommodating to various constraint options necessary for decision logic. I enabled the sharing of site results via a permalinking process, and incorporated a variety of features such as cost regression visualization, as well as the division of contaminants into dynamic groups based on the type of input data they require. I focused my efforts on scalable extensibility of the site through an administrator panel, enabling admins to manipulate constraints and user data, while decoupling much of the existing site from hardcoded input fields. The website is instead capable of flexibly drawing from the database in order to accommodate new and different types of inputs.

Continuing on the Water Treatment Technology Selection Guide team, I worked to design and implement a cohesive results page for the recommendation web tool, translating wireframes into a functional tool. I improved the mechanism by which data is passed between pages of the tool and worked to ensure all included fields were meaningful and fully functional. I contributed to ongoing work in the realms of style and functionality, and configured and deployed the site live to the AguaClara server.

As a part of the Water Treatment Technology Selection Guide team, I will contribute contributed to the development of an interactive tool which educates users about the different water treatment technologies available to them. I engaged in preliminary literature review surveying potential treatment options before designing the layout of a clean, modern, multi-page website built to provide treatment recommendations. I coded the stylesheets for the website in CSS, implemented form functionality using PHP and HTML, and worked to improve user interactivity with liberal use of JavaScript. Great consideration was given to minimizing user memory load and to making form inputs accessible to those without technical knowledge. I began preparations to deploy the site live on the AguaClara server, and worked to set up MySQL databases that will be used to log user input. Throughout the semester, I paid special attention to user experience, implementing features like parallax scrolling, maintained scroll position between pages, and pre-populated user inputs when users revisit site pages.

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