Gaurav Cedric Bhatnagar

Library & Sakai 3 Integration

While working as an Interaction Designer at the University of Michigan Library, I led the Library & Sakai 3 Integration project, a collaborative design effort amongst 13 universities.  The goal of the project was to understand how best to integrate licensed library content into the up-and-coming learning management system, Sakai 3 (previous codename for the Sakai Open Academic Environment).

I served as the lead interaction designer and project manager.  My main focus areas were:

• organizing and communicating with our diverse collaborators at universities around the world, building especially close relationships with researchers at UC Berkeley, Stanford and Indiana University
• practicing goal-directed design while educating and training collaborators on the process
• managing the project wiki, our main communication platform
• managing a team of three Interaction Design Interns at the University of Michigan Library

Together, we interviewed about 30 instructors across 13 universities, built personas, context scenarios and design prototypes that we presented at the 2010 Sakai Annual Conference.  Our research and designs for collaborative content management in an academic environment had a significant impact on Sakai OAE leadership and inspiration from our work can be seen in the current Sakai OAE product (partly because I was hired to be a User Interface Developer for Sakai OAE!).

Goal-directed design, user interviews, personas, mental models, workflow diagrams, context scenarios, prototyping

Jun 2009 to Jun 2010

• Library & Sakai 3 Integration Project Wiki
• Presentation 2010 Sakai Annual Conference
• My user interface development work on the Sakai Open Academic Environment