Not enough beds…

Homeless shelters in city centers are inundated with guests and consequently must turn away people each night.

…or not enough people.

Homeless shelters in suburban areas don’t have many guests and consequently often lose funding and shut down.

With Haven’s software, the distribution of people-to-beds across a city are optimized, ensuring the maximum amount of people have a place to stay at night.

During the user research process, I noticed several pain points on both the shelter side and guest side:

(1) Homeless shelters in city centers don’t have enough beds (forcing them to turn people away), whereas homeless shelters in suburban areas don’t have enough people to fill their beds (forcing them to lose funding and shut down).

(2) On the shelter side, nearly all shelters are face staffing constraints. On the guest side, guests are using an antiquated lottery system, in which they must walk to a shelter in the morning to apply for a bed that night, and check back in-person in the evening to see if they won the lottery.

Haven solves these problems.

By digitalizing the lottery system, homeless people can apply to multiple shelters in their city rather than just one. The software distributes people evenly across beds across the city, optimizing the amount of people-to-beds.

This relieves staffing pressure for those running the lottery, and it increase the odds of a homeless person will receive housing that night.

And by evenly distributing people-to-beds across a city, urban shelters won’t need to turn away people and suburban shelters won’t be forced to shut down due to lack of guests.

Harvard Presidential Award Semifinalist

Semifinalist in the Harvard Innovational Lab (i-Lab) annual startup competition. One of ~100 teams selected out of 450+ for the Venture Incubation Program.

Out for Undergrad (O4U) Pitch Finalist

Selected for all-expense paid conference at Twitter. One of three pitches selected as finalists. Pitched “Haven” to conference.

Square Code Camp Pitch Winner

One of 15 out of 600+ women selected for expense-paid weeklong immerse coding experience at Square. Won final pitch competition at weeklong program.

Based on user research conducted for this project, we found that young professionals (ages 18–24) oftentimes see The Times as a place for an intense, academic, and potentially overwhelming reading experience. The Times can be unappealing for young people because of what some described as this intense, academic experience.

At the same time, we found that many young readers of The Times do not explore many pieces of content; oftentimes, they will read one or two articles before leaving the site — not to return for another visit for quite some time. The Times struggles to retain many young users for more than a short period of time.

Research shows that many young people are inclined to read more “soft news” than “hard news.” In other words, evergreen content — features, long-form creative or interactive pieces, videos or multimedia, culture pieces is often more appealing. Much of the content on the front page of The Times is considered the most important news, but this important news is not always the most appealing to young readers. The Times creates many excellent pieces of evergreen content, but the content is not as accessible as it should be.

Our Solution: Discover The Times

Discover The Times is a single page that showcases some of the beautiful and compelling feature content that The New York Times publishes. The focus isn’t on hard breaking news but rather focuses on curated mix of feature articles, interactive journalism, 360-degree videos, podcasts, long-form pieces, photo galleries, interviews, and reviews.

In order for Discover the Times to succeed, a key element is ensuring readers can easily access the Discover page (that they can discover the Discover page, one might say…).

On the desktop platform, we explored two options. The most realistic option is to add a separate tab on the homepage navigation bar (shown as “Option 1” below). The second and most practical and effective option is a constant floating access button (shown as “Option 2” below). This would also encourage readers to stay in a constant loop of discovering content, ensuring that they read more than just one article during their visits to The Times.

On the mobile platform, we plan to include a card similar to what The Daily currently employs. Similarly, we want to reach users who are on social media, so we plan to implement a button on those articles and posts on social media.

What distinguishes Discover the Times is the content it features. It is not a trending page, nor is it a multimedia page, nor is it a youth page. It is a page with selected evergreen content — content that The Times prides itself on. This content is selected from a few categories:

• Featured

• Page-turners (long-form pieces)

• Popular on Social

• What to Watch

• Lifestyle Guides

• Podcasts

• Editor’s Picks

Content for the prototype was hand-selected from these categories. However, in the future this would be automated so that the page would be auto-populated with new pieces each morning.

Digital advertising potential is increasing within The New York Times. Most recently in the second quarter this year, digital advertising revenue increased 23 percent to $55 million.

Discover the Times would add value to increasing the digital advertising revenue with The Times as a whole. This would be done in three ways:

1. Section Front Advertisements:These advertisements would appear at the top of the Discover page, similar to the primary ad that appears on the top of The New York Times front page.

2. Articles in Collection: By resurfacing evergreen content and featuring curated content, Discover the Times would drive more readers to these articles and pieces of content — of which each have advertisements and thus would increase impressions.

3. Newsletter: Readers can opt in to receive Discover the Times in newsletter form in their inbox. Advertising potential in the newsletter would ad to increased revenue of Discover the Times.

After meeting with several advertising experts within The Times, below is an estimated amount of revenue Discover the Times could expect to bring in:

To take the product a step further, there are a few features that could be pursued after deployment of Discover the Times:

1. Personalization and Retention/Growth of Subscribers: Right now we focus on a carefully curated display of evergreen content. However, there is possibility for personalized evergreen content. This could work by the user originally selecting preferences and topics, and by consistently being able to press a thumbs up or thumbs down on Discover pieces they read. The algorithm that curates content could then learn what the user likes, providing content directly geared to that person. The personalization feature would only be available to subscribers of The New York Times, serving as a way to both retain subscribers as well as encourage casual readers to purchase a digital subscription.

2. Contribution to Other Times Initiatives: Based on a meeting we had with The Times’s Snapchat Discover team (who prepares and adapts content for Snapchat Discover), they like to feature evergreen content. In the future, we could see content being cross-applied between both platforms with both Snapchat Discover and Discover the Times working together to curate content. Or, data collected from Discover the Times (which has several slots for content each day) could assist in choosing which feature pieces with the most views could be selected for Snapchat Discover in the future (which has more limited slots for content each day).

3. Self-Sustainability: The goal of Discover the Times is to make it a page that can be auto-populated with content from the categories listed above, rather than having a team hand-picking content (hand-picked content would be selected by the algorithm from Editor’s Picks!). In the future, it would be critical to test the best ways of doing this. For example, it could be worth implementing an ‘evergreen’ tag to tag articles within Scoop.

With Discover the Times, we want to encourage readers — particularly young readers and unengaged readers — to get lost in the content The Times has to offer. We hope to empower people to lose track of time without wasting time.

Intern project by Aana Bansal, Akshay Patel, Annie Schugart, Benjamin Williams, Bridgette Tolbert, Delaney Haynes, Fatima Chaudhry, Julian Kelly and Riley Shanahan. Summer interns at The New York Times were given each Friday to collaborate within a group to research, test, brainstorm, and develop a new product for The New York Times that addresses a problem The Times faces.

Many people can remember arriving at Harvard as a freshman, not knowing a single face on campus, and yet their freshman proctor knew their name and made them feel at home.

House administrators spend significant time learning names.

House administrators all have their own methods to track student check-ins.

HouseKey makes it easy and fun for House administration to connect with the student community in two ways: first, it allows House administration to learn names and info of students; second, it facilitates consistent check-in meetings with students and allows for secure note-taking during these check-ins.

House academic deans are responsible for learning each student’s name (a total of over 400 students, most of the time!) along with their basic information. House tutors (in-house resident proctors) are responsible for learning names and information of students in their entryway (about 30 students). Each house administrator had a different way of learning these names: Brigitte, pictured above, cut out names and glued them to flashcards, and she keeps check-in notes on these flashcards as well. Other house administrators studied a printed out “face-book.”

HouseKey gamifies this process, making it simpler and quicker for House administrators to put names to a face.

House academic deans are responsible for keeping tabs on students’ academic and general wellbeing. Each house dean has a different system for taking notes and keeping track of check-ins.

HouseKey streamlines this by keeping a general student profile for each student, with the ability to add check-in notes and tags to sort students by.

All information is securely encrypted, a critical feature since the information handled within the app is confidential.

The app keeps a list of the students as well as a comprehensive search feature. The user could search name, nickname, concentration, or perhaps even a keyword from a check-in note.

The app also has advanced filtering tools. For example, the user could filter by “starred” students — one that the user “stars” during the game as someone the user doesn’t recognize.

HouseKey is a product I worked on in CS 179: Design of Useful and Usable Systems at Harvard, beginning from the need-finding process all the way through developing the app. I worked with Nick Merrill, Kunho Kim, and Christopher Mosch on this project. I ultimately became a teaching fellow for the course the following year.

I worked on documentation of user classes, personas and use cases for the current software system within the Disney Music Group. This was split up into both Licensing and Repertoire systems. As the software system architecture is under development to best fit user needs and data alignment, I also provided recommendations for the future state based on the overall use cases and users. Through this, I uncovered critical information about the detailed interweaving of multiple software systems currently in use by the Disney Music Group as well as redundancies in user actions.

Due to legal reasons, I cannot publicly share these final documents.

I worked on evaluation rights management systems for the Disney Music Group. I looked specifically at a new software in consideration to see if it would be a good fit for Disney Music Group’s future system architecture, as well as if its features were beneficial to be configured for a music rights system. After speaking with Disney Music Group users and digging deeper into the software options, my ultimate recommendation was to revamp the a current software system to implement a prioritized list of features solving for current rights management use cases that would best optimize for Disney Music Group’s most prominent and urgent needs.

I had the opportunity to work with 5 other Studio interns, each who worked in a wide variety of roles (not just technology). We were posed the question ““In what ways can the Studio better drive digital content to the global millennial market?” At first this seemed almost like a cliched topic, but it turned out to be a fascinating project topic because the millennial age group is the one Disney often struggles to engage most (it is in between the age of young kids and the adults who bring young kids to the movies, but it’s an age group that can play on the idea of nostalgia). I dug deep into Instagram data and strategy of several of the Disney accounts and found some interesting conclusions to inform future strategy. One such conclusion is that image posts get nearly 3x the average engagement than video, even though Disney primarily posts videos.

We presented our final set of ideas at the Ideathon at the end of our internship.

Disney provided me the opportunity to not only work on projects during my internship but also to spend time learning. A few of my primary learning takeaways are as follows:

• I spent a lot of time digging deeply into the entire spectrum of the music business, something I knew very little about, and something I had no idea involved such complexity. This informed my understanding of the multiple software systems and data management used by the Disney Music Group.

• I learned a lot about the technicalities of product development as a whole. I absolutely loved reading Software Requirements: Developer Best Practices, for example.

• I learned about the structure of Disney Music Group and its complex mass of data as well as employee user role. I learned significantly about the studio and technology through core curriculum classes.

• I learned a lot about Disney at large. I know very little about classic Disney movies and have never watched movies like Aladdin. This summer definitely caught me up on my Disney trivia!

Disney’s internship was one that was well-structured, well-rounded and a complete experience—beyond simply the office. A few of my favorite experiences, outside of direct work, included:

• Studio Lot tour

• Intern discussions with Studio Tech leaders

• Core Curriculum

• Women@Disney events

• Intern-Specific Events

  • Kickoff

  • Disneyland Day

  • Former Intern Panel

• Disneyland 5k

While my time at Disney was fairly short—just 11 weeks—I left the internship with many takeaways. While the above page mentions much about the concrete items I learned, from music business to product development skills, as well as concrete projects I worked on, my learning went beyond concrete abilities as well:

• I learned a lot about how product development fits into the overall technology experience, and this better informs me when I’m making decisions of planning my career and whether I want to focus on software engineering, product development, etc.

• I learned a lot about how technology plays a role in a company as big as Disney. One of the reasons I chose this internship (because as mentioned earlier I actually know very little about Disney movies) is because I think Walt Disney is one of the greatest tech innovators of our time. I did really get to see that innovation this summer, seeing how everything Disney does really is informed by the power of technology.

One of the most important aspects I’ve learned as a product designer and leader is the ability to effectively critique.

I’ve compiled some examples of my design critiques during my time as a Teaching Fellow in CS 179: Design of Useful and Usable Interactive Systems at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. To maintain student privacy, this page is password protected. If you do not have the password and would like it, please fill out the form below, and I will send you a password promptly.

Please click here to enter the password and view this page.

• Putting Harvard on Hold (The Harvard Crimson)

• Glimpses of a New Reality (The Harvard Crimson)

• Political Correctness Debate Shook Harvard (The Harvard Crimson)

• The Best in Interactive Multimedia Journalism: Pushing the Limits of Storytelling (Medium)

• The Computer Science Experience at Harvard (Medium)

• Building on a Feeling (The Harvard Crimson)

• The Whispers of a Movement (The Harvard Crimson)

• Classics in HCI: Research Papers Critical to the Field of Human-Computer Interaction (Medium)

• Computer Science in Japan (Medium)