James Rubinstein

A friend of mine, needed a website for his new business. He wanted something easy-to-use, good looking, and simple to navigate.
I chose wordpress as the platform for it’s back-end and front-end user friendliness. Getting it to look ‘right’ was a challenge. It uses the Gear theme, heavily modified by me.

The look and feel is pretty slick, particularly with the ‘lightbox’ effect on the pictures

Check it out at www.birkenstockengineering.com. Be sure to check out the driving simulator

Probably my biggest project to date. The B&B SwapShop is an online classified service tied in with B&B Sporting Goods & Pawn and WRIX FM radio. There is a radio show Saturday Morning from 930-10am, all the items on the show get advertised on the website, which is pretty cool.

There is still some work to be done, but it’s up and operating and I’m quite pleased with it. It’s based on Drupal 6.

Since graduation last year I’ve been working at the Anderson County Farmer’s Market. While that may seem a far cry from Human Factors, it isn’t.

Much of the work we’ve been doing at the Farmer’s Market has revolved around putting together some new and interesting programs to help put more money in farmers’ pockets. To that end, Brandon, Allison, Diana, and I have created the Anderson County Farm & Food Plan. The Farm & Food plan is a comprehensive, system based approach to solving the food problems of Anderson County. The chief food problem being “Why aren’t we feeding ourselves?”. Anderson County has plenty of “farmland” (quotations because it’s not used for farming, but rather as a tax designation”, and we spend half a billion dollars on food. With much of that money going to other states or countries, that’s a big problem.

To solve  this problem we took a User-Centered Design approach to these agricultural systems.

To get more detail check out the Farm & Food Plan

Some drawings Henrique made for the AWE project made it to TV! They were part of the background during a scene at the “California Design School” on the ABC Family Channel show “Lincoln Heights”. It appears all the drawings in the background of the pictures below are AWE design studies. I don’t have much more info than that, but I think it’s really neat that the Animated Work Environment is getting some interesting recognition. Go Henrique!

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So, I finished up my wife’s website, for her wedding photography business. If anyone in the upstate, SC area needs a wedding photographer, check out www.devinrubinstein.com.

I built the site using drupal 5.x, using Brilliant gallery to make the gallery management easy for her.  Check it out, let me know what you think.

I’ve put in a bit of work last week on pinpow!, which is a full-service web and graphic design company that my friend Ryan has been working on. Check it out.

Just wanted to put it out there: I have been graduated!

Yesterday I received my Master’s Degree in Applied Psychology.  My concentration is Human Factors.

Yay me!

ETRA ‘08 was this week, I didn’t get to present but Michael and Andrew took care of it. I just thought I’d share the presentation they gave. Enjoy.

I just want to share this with people. It’s a new usability tool to simulate eye tracking and also visual blur. It can be a great tool, especially for those of us who don’t have eye trackers around the house. It’s called the Stompernet Scrutinizer, and it was developed by my friend Andy Edmonds.

Here’s a short video screencast of the scrutinizer.

So, go download it, and have fun!

I decided to make some changes to the site. I have now upgraded to the latest stable version of WordPress (2.3.1). I have also made some changes to the “Zen in Grey” theme, originally designed by Sajith M . I’ve now added the Clemson HFES site to the projects pages. Hopefully it has increased the usability of the site. I think it looks nicer, anyway.