Mark Nickerson

The mobile application Elastic is designed to help users identify and eliminate pains in their bodies by supplying tailored treatments for individuals with daily pains in one centralized program. These treatments include both elementary, yet effective stretches as well as simple home remedies. The application is not meant to replace medical treatment but rather is intended to be used in supplement as a first resort option for those individuals who have a more active lifestyle. In addition to this, Elastic is designed to serve as a central repository of information for areas throughout one’s body to make searching for solutions to their soreness faster and easier.

To better capture the intended audience, 40 individuals that were identified to be potential users were polled anonymously through google forms. The questionnaire was designed to take under five minutes and had both multiple-choice answers and open response options. These individuals included peers and fellow students, office workers, and physical laborers. Of the people surveyed, two types of users were identified. The moderately active type and the always active type. By conducting these interviews, it was determined that the presumed initial audience differed significantly from what was gathered through the interview process--as it was initially speculated that there would be two types: the active and the sedentary type. By conducting these interviews, the design process could proceed with a more active type in mind.

This project was developed with a user-centric approach, implementing common Human-Computer Interaction design techniques and was evaluated based on industry standard design heuristics.

Find out more about the project here.

Foodini is an iOS app developed using Swift that allows users to take inventory of the food they have at home. Users can populate their pantry with the food they have, add expiration dates, add the price they paid, and even flag each item for their relevant allergens. With push notifications enabled, users will be reminded of the food that is close to expiry, which will in turn keep users from wasting food and money.

Users can create multiple shopping lists via “quick add,” “detail add,” and “barcode scan.” With the “barcode scan” option, the user is given the opportunity to auto-populate an item via a simple barcode scan. This implements the Edamam API and is designed to streamline the process of adding items to the user’s shopping list.

My greatest contribution to this project was the development and use of the Edamam API. Ensuring the user had a streamlined experience, I implemented Alamofire HTTP requests and custom API handlers as to not block the main UI thread.

Find out more about the project here.

Using the C++ StarCraft II API, I led a small team of 4 others in developing a system that used influence maps (generated based off enemy locations) and modified A* techniques to determine the safest-shortest path for a unit to take. By combining the two techniques of path planning and influence maps, better traversal in a dynamic environment is possible. This safer traversal leads to an agent that is more adaptive, responsive, and flexible to an environment with different enemies, resources, and building types. More intuitive path planning system involve the implementation and generation of multiple influence maps–by giving certain key characteristics (for buildings or units) a specified amount of influence and influence decay, agents are able to dynamically assess the safest shortest path.