Products I've kicked off

Below is a sampling of products I've worked on for which I was either the solo or main contributing product designer. In the near future I'll expand on each to talk about the full process behind the product—why it came to be, challenges faced in the process, and lessons learned.

Backtrack

Backtrack sought to empower back pain sufferers to overcome the chronic pain debilitating their lives by quantifying their recovery. As a product, it spans a wide gamut of technology, from the wearable used to detect every motion of its wearer, through the mobile apps used to pick up data and present a view into the wearer's rehab, and through to the data processing in remote servers to process the data.

Smart Minerva

Smart Minerva was the first product I deployed to a consumer audience, and the one I credit with making me fall in love with software. It started as a way to scratch my own itch, and quickly evolved into a popular product on campus that made me realize that I alone or in a small team could create something that could help countless others, with near-zero marginal reproduction cost. There was no way for me to pick and choose a set of courses and automatically find all combinations without conflicts, so I built the tool to do it, and released it to other students. It quickly spread by word of mouth. There's a lot more to this story I hope to detail soon.

docuum

docuum was created as a response to a common point of feedback I heard from users of my earlier software Smart Minerva. While my users loved that I had solved the course scheduling pain point for them, they still had trouble choosing courses. What started as a repository of course syllabi quickly turned into a document sharing and course review site, to this day the most popular exam sharing site at McGill.

Qestu

Following the success of Smart Minerva and docuum, I became fixated on educational software. One reason certainly is that I was living life as a student. I also felt that the software present in educational environments was lacking, and with a strong interest in pedagogy and understanding how people learn, I felt my contribution in the area was worth spending time. Qestu was an attempt to make a social platform for students to ask and answer questions related to coursework, thereby naturally growing a corpus of knowledge around specific courses.