RPI TV

In Fall 2009, I was asked by the officers of RPI TV to create the user interface, look, and overarching design for the new Ruby on Rails-powered website. The resulting site is probably the most complex Rails-powered website I've ever worked on, yet I'm pleased with the results. The old website was powered by PHP and had a very convoluted design that started in the database schema and extended to the forward-facing organization. The new website has an extreme focus on the station's web-streaming productions, which have quickly become the most popular means of distributing their productions after filming and post-production.

I drew inspirations from Hulu's thumbnail-based video browsing and built the site with several design philosophies in mind:

• Quick access to information about productions with assistance from jQuery (specifically, the incredible jQuery Tools library).
• Directly embedded administrative controls for any officers who are logged into the RPI-centric website.
• Abilities to highlight productions and other information (news updates, events, etc.) from the club within seconds.

The website officially launched on Tuesday, January 26, 2010. A lot of the basic foundation of the site code was built by Kyle MacKenzie and Michael DiTore with help from current RPI TV President Reilly Hamilton, but from the point I signed on we worked together to really flesh it out. I'm really impressed with the work we did as a team.

I prepared an overview of the design for the website to submit for a grade in Roger Grice's Foundations of HCI Usability course at RPI. Please download the report for more detailed information about the intended audience and design considerations of a slightly-older-than-final version of the site.