Prateek Kakirwar

Spring 2010 | Fall 2009

Rules for Location Sharing | Design Case Study - Improving the Reseller Service System | Collaboration Analysis of Industry-University Alliance Programs

Spring 2010

INFO 213: User Interface Design and Development

Project: Rules for Location Sharing

This course offered by Prof. Jeffrey Nichols focuses on the design, prototyping, and evaluation of user interfaces and applications for computing devices, often called Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

Design Concept

Our project is to build a mobile application that allows users to create rules for location disclosure and handle real-time exceptions to these rules. People have complex practices about information disclosure and the circumstances in which they share information. This is especially true for sensitive and private data like location. By combining rules for sharing location with a hierarchy of location and personal description users will be able to report more or less detailed location information to different people. Practically, our application will let a user define rules about who sees what. For example, a person could tell distant friends what city she is in (e.g. "San Francisco"); close friends might see a description of where this person is (e.g. "a coffee shop"); a significant other might have access to the user's exact location. This application should also handle exceptions, like the need to share an exact location with a friend you are meeting for dinner.

The recent implementation of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA) has made it illegal for any business or person to sell recalled products. This causes drastic changes to the processes of any consumer product vendor; rather than avoid taking responsibility for recalled products or even doing a brief check for recalled products out of consumer social responsibility, all vendors are legally responsible for thoroughly checking that none of the products in their inventory have been recalled. This problem becomes especially complicated for vendors in the secondary market (referred to as resellers in this report) because the products they sell have no packaging and thus no UPC or SKU to quickly identify the product. This results in a time-consuming and costly process to determine each product's recall status. Therefore, resellers need a solution for quickly checking their inventories to determine if any products have been recalled.

Through this project, we wanted to close the information gap between the government and manufacturers who initiate the recalls and the buyers and sellers who unknowingly keep the dangerous products in circulation. To do so, our group has partnered with the product safety company, WeMakeItSafer, who has created a technology called Inventory Checker (IC). Given a reseller's product inventory, IC can determine which products have been recalled. When we started the project, using IC was a manual process, requiring email to send and receive information. Our objective for this project was to convert IC from a manual process to an automated process and while doing so, determine the best way to integrate this technology into resellers' current business processes. An automated IC application could be used by resellers to quickly check their entire store inventory as well as new deliveries that come in to ensure that no recalled products exist within their inventories. A possible constraint may be reseller willingness to pay for the application.

We feel that creating an automated IC application is a timely solution since the CPSIA makes it illegal for anyone, not just retail stores, to sell recalled products -- imposing fines of up to $100,000 per instance and possible criminal penalties for those who do. There are a lot of opportunities for expansion of the application such as offering customization and additional features and it can be deployed on a wide range of technology platforms, from mobile devices to in-store kiosks.

This course, offered by Prof. Morten Hansen, focused on managing people in information-intensive firms and industries, such as information technology industries. We studied the innovation value chain in large companies, barriers to collaboration and decision making processes.

For the Cypress University Collaboratipn project, our team studied the Inter-Organization collaboration between Cypress and Universities. We started this study with the following broad questions.