Competency D
Identify user needs, ideate informatics products and services, prototype new concepts, and evaluate a prototype’s usability;
Personal Definition and Importance
All the SJSU Informatics competencies are deliberate and important, and a few other competencies call out users as a focus. Competency D, is about the final resulting product that users see and understand. All other competencies are mainly about the behind the scenes development and management of informatics products. This competency really is about creating and releasing informatics products, mainly the software based around data and information that end-users can interact with. So in the context of informatics, it is really the analysis of a product that is important. This requires prototyping and analyzing in order to fine tune and test before releasing products. Ideation and the resulting prototype help to verify a product can be produced and any misconceptions addressed and refined. I also found that unexpected results can be useful and incorporated after further analysis of the prototype.
Supporting Informatics Courses
believe that every course in the SJSU Informatics program is about making informatics products usable. That is what informatics is, making data and information useful for end-users. For this e-portfolio and this competency I will focus on two health centric products. Presented below are a paper for INFM 201 Informatics: Technology Foundations and a presentation for INFM 210 Health Informatics. Both products focus on the end-user as informed decision makers. I also present a report for INFM 203 Big Data Analytics and Management that in fact tests and learns from using some APIs for stock market data in Python using the Jupyter Notebook environment to test.
Evidence
Evidence 1: INFM 201 Final Paper
I selected this paper because it really is something I would like to create for myself and believe could be expanded for public use. One component of this paper is to have user's enter weight for body composition goals. In looking up body composition formulas I discovered that many formulas are based on kilograms rather than lbs. Also, other formulas are based on age and sex. While I would like to make this for myself, if I were using this I would not want to look up lbs and kilogram conversions, or inches versus centimeters conversions. I don't even want to have to look up feet to inches conversions. Prototyping and analyzing the ideation reveals many weaknesses that can be easily addressed, especially if this product were to be offered to the general public. This document shows the ideation of a virtual personal assistant in the form of a decision support system (DSS) in order to track personal health goals. This DSS meant to be modular with the ability to add or customize modules such as financial goals along with health goals. This paper shows how decision makers interact with a DSS and there are some diagrams and pseudo code.
Evidence 2: INFM 210 Personal Health Records Powerpoint
I selected this PowerPoint to show how an ideation can combine personal health choices and public health goals in harmonious fashion. This PowerPoint is to promote a Personal Health Records (PHR) system in the service of public health but with informed patients as decision makers. This is meant to promote personal agency and access to information for personal medical health to both improve an individual’s health and in alignment with public health goals at large. A publicly promoted personal health records program would help give patients reliably informed sources for health goals that are beneficial to the individual and to public health organizations in a cooperative fashion.
Evidence 3: INFM 203 Report 4
I selected this evidence to display how to ideate and test using readily available API's, programming libraries, and the scientific notebook environment to test and share ideas. This paper is a result of exploring a data science project around the stock market. I tested yfinance and yahoo_fin libraries to access the Yahoo Finance API for stock market data. I also tested other ways to retrieve stock market data from other sources such as Wikipedia. I was also able to see that some sorts of programming functions brought in more interesting data to work with than I had previously realized, and some brought in irrelevant data.
Professional Application Value of Skill
The evidence above shows my ability to ideate informatics products for many types of end-users. While the end-user is the focal point as a decision maker, I have shown the ability to focus exclusively on the individual end-user, and the ability to marry the end-user with societal goals while promoting and endorsing the end-user as an involved responsible agent. The above examples focus on private and public health, but I can apply this to education and cybersecurity, which are not mutually exclusive. I believe that informatics is meant to give decision makers access to relevant information by creating products for that end. I will be endeavoring to create a personal DSS to manage tedious tasks like health, exercise, calories, financials, etc., things from calculating calories vs. exercise and goals, as well as financial goals. I would like the opportunity to participate in this project at a professional level as well.