About
Hello, my name is Pascal Belouin. Welcome to my online resumé and portfolio.
My specialty is web application design and development with a strong focus on user interface design and information architecture using agile, user-centered and test-driven development methodologies. I have been designing and developing software professionally since 2001 using technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, JQuery, MySQL, MongoDB, Haml and Sass. I have also an interest in mobile application development using, amongst other things, Appcelerator Titanium.
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Download my Resumé My main research interest resides in the elaboration and real-world application of agile, user-centered software development methodologies based on theories borrowed from the social sciences. More precisely, I am interested in applying theories, concepts and methods including discourse analysis, ethnography, interviews and focus groups, persona design, cognitive walkthroughs or questionnaires to interactive system design: please visit my blog for more information about this.
Featured Projects
Medical Schools Council Item Bank
The MSC-AA Item Bank is a large enterprise web application allowing for the authoring, quality assurance, distribution and tagging of medical examination questions, built to rival and overcome the shortcomings of commercial solutions in terms of collaboration support and quality assurance management.
This application is designed to support the activities and processes of the Medical Schools Council Assessment Alliance and thus allows all medical schools in the United Kingdom to collaborate in the creation and quality assurance of a common pool of medical examination questions.
Development of this system started in January 2010, and it went live in May 2011. It was designed on the basis of the requirements elicitated in the framework of the second phase of the UKCDR project.
The application is written in ruby and makes uses of MongoDB, a document-based database, and is the fruit of a partnership between the MSC-AA and epiGenesys, an agile software development company based in Sheffield, UK.
I am responsible for leading the development of this project, and have contributed to large parts of the user experience, interface design, front-end and back-end development and overall architecture of this system.
moscee
moscee is an application designed to run on mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone.
It can be used to painlessly and cost-effectively mark OSCEs (Objective Structured Clinical Examination). moscee can be used by any medical school, whether they have wireless internet or can access mobile internet through their mobile phone provider.
moscee can be modified to suit the needs of a large number of medical schools, to adapt to their particular way of doing things, and can even be run on your own server! Please contact me if you think we can help you, or visit the moscee website to get more information.
e-tips v2
e-tips v2 is a system currently processing in excess of £200 million of temporary agency labour spend p.a. for some of the largest companies in the UK, such as Royal Mail, Sainsbury's, Biffa, TNT...
Written in one year in PHP and MySQL , this large and complex system allows each client and each agency to electronically manage the working hours of each temporary worker. It features a large amount of complex functionalities, such as the real-time calculation of the entered working hours' total cost according to a completely customisable rate management system.
Great efforts were made during this project to ensure that the requirements were fully met, and even anticipated as the system grew larger. Thus, a proactive user-centric development methodology (indeed, almost a policy) has been adopted from the very early stages of the project. This entailed very close contact with the 'domain experts', the numerous stakeholders of the system. A three-days user study was also organised with numerous representatives of these different categories of stakeholders in order to test the prototype and to gather data regarding its usability. Please check out the article for more information. The commercial brochure is also available.
I have also been responsible of the design (including requirement elicitation, interface design, data architecture) of another system for de Poel, called Sub-e core. This system allows clients to completely manage their relationship with subcontractors, including the management of delivery routes, the particular metadata stored against various 'objects' of the system such as drivers, routes, etc... Working closely with a team of very talented developers and testers, we used a mixture of ajax and Zend Framework to provide the users of the system with a very dynamic user experience.
Interface Design for a Video Capture and Analysis Software Tool
Performed for my second Master Thesis (MRes in Human Computer Interaction, Lancaster University), and in the framework of the EUNZ exchange program, the objective of this project was to design the interface for a video capture and analysis software tool, with a particular focus on the indexation and “tagging” of the video and audio data produced by the use of such a tool, in order to allow its users to easily retrieve and analyse different pieces of video.
Blobby the Little Alien Explorer
An educative application in flash made using discreet plasma for 3D modeling. Please download the prototype Here (file size: 15 Mo). The academic feedback for this project is also available.