I'm Ryan. Recent Master's graduate. I teach Using Information Technology classes and I study User Experience.
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My background
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 • 
East Tennessee State University
East Tennessee State University
Concentration in User Experience Engineering
December 2023 • GPA: 4.0 • Honors: 
Upsilon Pi Epsilon
Upsilon Pi Epsilon
B.S. in Computing •
East Tennessee State University
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
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
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
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.