Ryan portrait 2

I'm Ryan. Recent Master's graduate. I teach Using Information Technology classes and I study User Experience. I take my coffee #000 !

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My background

Ryan with parents in graduation regalia
My journey toward UX design began in my free time as an undergraduate, when I started learning to develop websites in Django (which also runs this site!), building up my architecture and interface design skills, slowly and painfully at times!
While finishing my Master's degree at East Tennessee State University (ETSU) in the Fall of 2023, I continued to teach introductory Information Technology courses, serving as a mentor to new teaching assistants. Now I am continuing to collaborate on a project team with the ETSU Computing Department's local law-enforcement partners. I am designing and developing TAKadmin — a unique LDAP role-management interface for provisioning cross-authority user access to a Team Awareness Kit (TAK) environment, to ultimately enable better public safety, emergency response, and visibility across multiple counties and agencies.
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My education

M.S. in Information Systems • ETSU logo  East Tennessee State University
Concentration in User Experience Engineering
December 2023 • GPA: 4.0 • Honors: UPE logoUpsilon Pi Epsilon

B.S. in Computing • ETSU logo  East Tennessee State University
Concentration in Information Systems • Minor in Management
December 2021 • GPA: 3.8 • Honors: Dean's List each semester
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My favorite things

May 2023 - present • East Tennessee State University

Designing TAKadmin for better user management

TAKadmin wireframes
In the Spring of 2023, shortly after my graduate team concluded work on our mobile wayfinding project, our Emergency Management Leader and local law enforcement partners made us aware of their need for increased situational awareness to enable better emergency response and public safety....
In order to achieve wider cross-county and cross-agency buy-in to join the TAK environment, our clients looked to ETSU as a neutral party to host a centralized TAK server. I continue to incrementally design and document my TAKadmin interface to provide much-needed user management capabilities to TAK through an LDAP respository.
The user interface, a standalone Django web application, reads and updates data in the LDAP repository through a standalone Node.js REST API that I am developing and documenting concurrently with my development of the TAKadmin web application. As my interface nears completion, I will be working with my teammates in the coming months to produce training materials for TAKadmin along with internal documentation and policies of governance and acceptable use.
December 2022 - present • Personal

Improving lesson delivery with ClassManager

ClassManager interface
When I started my teaching assistantship at ETSU in the Fall of 2022, my lesson delivery often felt choppy as I transitioned from presenting a pre-class fun activity to taking attendance to my lecture slides and then an interactive... game. What I needed was a dashboard that organized my lesson content on one screen. I also needed an easier way to track students who have consecutive absences in each of my sections so I could better help those students who may be at risk.
In the Winter of 2022-23, I decided to do something about my aforementioned classroom needs. So I went to my whiteboard and started drafting ER diagrams and interface designs. Then I got busy implementing my vision in Django, cycling iteratively between the whiteboard, the backend, and the frontend design, revising and modifying the data model as I went.
ClassManager presented many challenges. It took me nearly an entire day to figure out how to hack Django into writing a binary stream of a generated QR code into an AWS storage location! Tackling the nuances of attendance tracking was another major feat, but now I and several instructors use ClassManager to better facilitate our instruction and manage our attendance records.
January 2022 - March 2023 • East Tennessee State University

Researching smartphone-based wayfinding for disabled users

Wayfinding info
In the Fall of 2022, I learned that our Disability Services office was interested in Researching mobile wayfinding for disabled users to help them better navigate in buildings on ETSU's main campus. In the following Spring semester, we formed a small student research team to investigate the technologies and approaches... , such as triangulation with Bluetooth Low-energy beacons and smartphones, with special attention to our two target disability groups: mobility-impaired and visually impaired users. Linking our findings with recommendations from our Equity and Inclusion committee and talking to mobile wayfinding curators in other universities, we built up a list of requirements for a mobile wayfinding system with a separate subset of requirements for a smartphone app to serve as the user interface.
After our requirements phase, my team members and I worked in parallel to research third-party mobile wayfinding vendors, mock a mobile app interface, and designed a system ontology representing the interactions between an in-house map server and client smartphone apps. We documented our findings concerning the cost, implementation, maintenance, and safety of mobile wayfinding systems.
In the end, our university decided that we did not have the resources to safely and continually maintain such a system. While this was not the result my team hoped for, we were satisfied knowing that we had thoroughly researched this topic, giving our best recommendations while being fully transparent about the many concerns implementing and maintaining such a system would entail. I hope that as beaconing technology improves and indoor wayfinding in campus settings is more widely researched, ETSU and other campuses will one day be able to increase accessibility by implementing indoor wayfinding.