About

Hello!

I would first like to thank you for taking the time to explore my portfolio (if you arrived here by accident, then welcome). Now, I would love to tell you a story of how “I always knew I wanted to be working in the tech industry”, but I would be lying. I wanted to be all sorts of things like an artist, a nurse, a biology teacher and even a zookeeper. I still love these things, but through all of this I have finally found my calling— designing user experiences.

The decision

I began my journey having to decide between studying teaching or graphic design. I could go into teaching knowing it is something I would love to to do, or take the plunge into graphic design— an unknown world that left my family asking “well what the heck kind of job are you going to get with that?”. Like most 18 year olds, I went for the one that would test my parents sanity, graphic design. Little did I know it was the best decision I could have made. Next thing I knew I was packing my world away into the mini van and heading up to the State University of New York at Oswego on the shores of Lake Ontario.

Hey look I can click on this!

Flash forward a few years, a few classes on typography here, some on branding there. I was learning a lot and making some pretty cool things, but I wanted something more “interactive” if you will. This is where I found myself diving headfirst into every web design or code driven class I could. I was fascinated by the very nature of interaction, being able to manipulate what the user was seeing by something as simple as clicking a button. I found it exciting how I could use what I learned from design and illustration in my new web-based projects. I fell in love with the struggle of learning front-end development through HTML5, CSS3, and eventually PHP, SASS and some Javascript. It is both equally frustrating and addicting when you finally realize the reason your stylesheet broke was because of a silly missing curly brace (curse you curly braces!).

The pivotal moment

It’s now halfway through my last semester and low-and-behold, here comes what felt like an identity crisis. I was trying to look for potential jobs in graphic design, but nothing was really exciting to me. At the same time, I was developing skills in web and interaction design, but didn’t feel like I had enough training. What’s a girl to do? That’s where the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Masters program came to the rescue! It was just a normal day in web design, when in walks this English man wearing all black and carrying a NAO robot— Dr. Damian Schofield. He was the head of the HCI department was here to tell us about the program, where future technology is headed, made the robot dance and told us all how we could be apart of it… and that’s when I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I did some more research on HCI and found myself applying for the program that day.

Where I am now

Phew, finally made it! I felt it was necessary to let you know where I started in order to better understand where I am now. I am about to be graduating from the HCI program and happy to say I am extremely excited to see where it takes me. In the past two years I have developed and honed skills I never knew were possible. From running usability tests, cognitive walkthroughs and heuristic evaluations I have become aware of the testing methods necessary to develop systems that are focused on the user. Something as simple as asking potential users “How do feel about this?” or “Can you find that?” can help solve a number of usability issues. I have also worked on teams with varying backgrounds to create anything from high-fidelity prototypes to fully-fledged web sites. Finally, I think what makes me unique are the tools I learned in graphic design. Combining them with a user-centered design process has helped me understand that you can make something look amazing, but if it doesn’t work for your users, then you need to go back to the drawing board.

Well, there you have it, thanks for reading!