Wilson Chen
Garage

Empathy Bytes: from site critique to a rebuilt website

Empathy Bytes records oral histories of Georgia Tech communities. Over three semesters I went from contributor to co-lead of a four-person web track, then led a web team of more than ten through a rebuild of the site.

Georgia Tech Library · Vertically Integrated Projects

My Adobe XD mockup of an Empathy Bytes app promotion page: the app's purpose, phone screens, an App Store badge, and an interview collections section
Spring 2022.
Status
Student project
Role
Web contributor, co-lead, then lead
Methods
Site critique, design sprints, Figma, Gatsby, React
Timeline
Three semesters · 2021 to 2022
Team
Web track of 4, then more than 10

Oral histories, made interactive.

Empathy Bytes is a Vertically Integrated Projects team at the Georgia Tech Library. It interviews campus communities and looks for ways to make those histories interactive or immersive, such as a sound walk.

In fall 2021 I joined the website effort and worked on an iOS augmented reality app in Swift. The next two semesters, I focused on the web track.

Spring 2022: critique first, then prototype.

My site evaluation notes: critiques of the navigation bar font, page widths, empty space, and how photo collections were grouped, beside a screenshot of the site
February 2022.

As co-lead of a four-person web track, I planned the semester as three milestones, with flex weeks built in for exams and overruns.

  1. Site critiques. Each member reviewed the existing WordPress site for usability and accessibility. The review doubled as onboarding for new members.
  2. App promotion pages. A design sprint for a page promoting the team’s augmented reality app: research, ideation, and critique of each other’s mockups.
  3. Subteam feature pages. Pages showing each subteam’s work behind the scenes. Mine featured the Unity team.

I ran weekly check-ins, compiled the track’s work, and presented it at the monthly all-team meetings. By the end, the track wanted to leave WordPress for hand-built HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, where styling and interaction would be easier to control.

Fall 2022: from four people to more than ten.

Interest in the web track more than doubled, so most of my work became infrastructure and support.

I chose the stack: Gatsby and React, with WordPress kept as a content source. I set up the repository, permissions, and a GitHub Pages deployment pipeline. Every developer’s first task was to build one component and open a pull request, so everyone learned both the framework and the shared review process before real work began.

We worked in three two-week sprints. I met with team members individually, pair-programmed through problems, reviewed code, and wrote the documentation that the next semester would inherit.

The repository is archived; its live site no longer resolves.

Leading a larger team meant less building.

The more people joined, the more my job became making sure each of them could contribute: a friendly start, a clear first task, and someone to ask. I left the team before my final semester to focus on graduate applications.