Self-reflection of how I get into UX
As a starting point of a writing series for the course — HCDE 512 International UX Experience and Communication — at the University of Washington, the following article is a snapshot of who I am in regards to my cultural, linguistic, UX and AI experience.
Overall, I am a hands-on person who has a general interest in the realm of technology, psychology, and learning sciences, especially interested in engagement design and designing for mundane to sublime.
Linguistic & Cultural Experience
In the past decades, I have visited seventeen countries all over the world and love seeing the variances and commonalities among different cultures. This long journey of interest in humanities and culture all starts from my childhood.
Long story short, as I have lived and studied in several provinces in China, knowing multiple dialects was a must. Though Mandarin is one of the official languages of China, people from different cities would casually speak dialects that they commonly used in specific regions. My parents are from two ethnic groups in China with two distinct cultures embedded. They know dissimilar dialects, grow up in different environments, love various food, and even have opposite personalities. My father is Manchu, an ethnic minority in China, grew up in northern China close to Russia; my mother is Hakka, another ethnic group, from southern China close to Hongkong. However, despite all of these differences, my parents share the same value, happiness in life and ME :D
Following them around in China since I was only 4 gave me a hard time in learning fundamental subjects in school and in grasping dialects deeply in terms of both listening and speaking skills (i.e., moving to different provinces almost yearly before my 5th grade). However, I learned how to quickly pick up the listening skill, as I gradually figured out the existence of intriguing patterns among various dialects and languages. They, though, have different lexicons, grammars, and pronunciations, you can predict some of the shift by identifying patterns and the values that they share.
English and Japanese are the languages that I later have formally trained in school. I am fascinated by the differences among language systems and how one dialect/language could derive and absorb traits from others, which ultimately affect the embedded culture.
With all the above interests in humanity and culture, though, I acquired my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science as our life and society are filled with technologies. No matter what field we are in, it is inevitably to have interaction with the technology. Moreover, the time that I had to study alone in a different city from where my parents work got me a passion for utilizing technology to bring people closer (Yup, I was thinking about VR and Haptics technology when I was in elementary school... I couldn’t agree with Simon Sinek’s idea anymore that human is a gregarious social animal. The eagerness to be together as a group is part of human nature.)
After my 2nd year at the University of Michigan, a poster from a summer school program, Semester At Sea, caught my eyes on campus. I was then lucky enough to start my journey to Europe in the summer of 2014. By taking courses onboard— International Relations, Marine Biology, and Photography — with in-depth field trips in different countries, I was fascinated again by the variances in the civilization in different countries.
Everything was on-track. I was continuously working on my strong technical foundation, and hoping to contribute to the innovative field like taste and smell in the virtual reality.
As I learned more and worked in the industry a bit, I gradually realized that there is a discrepancy between reality and ideal. New techs did not necessarily bring us closer but instead isolated each one in the virtual world.
My father was holding his iPhone every day, talking to his friends, and browsing endless video clips online; my mother was wearing her glasses, working on the computer to learn whatever new skill that she recently got into.
This was what I experienced going back home after years and months of study abroad, alone. I just wanted to enjoy this precious family time with them, both physically and mentally.
At this point, I want to dive into the design rationale behind the digital product. I hope to contribute to the quality of life and the well-being of humanity through technologies in a multidisciplinary approach.
Currently, I am pursuing a Master’s degree in Human-centered Design Engineering at the University of Washington. I love the immediate feedback on the impact that I have made when working in the industry. However, I want to acquire solid research skills, and learning more in-depth knowledge as much as possible in multiple disciplines — Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Humane Technology, Informatics, Psychology, and Learning Sciences — to help me reach my end goal of improving the quality of life of everyone in the world.
UX & AI Experiences
Thus far, I mainly acquired UX knowledge and practiced research & design skills through the course projects at school. The user-centered design process has been accentuated by all the courses — HCDE 518 UCD course led students go through the process from ideation to the final high-fidelity prototype in the topic of citizen science (Project from our team); HCDE 517 heavily focused on the usability testing techniques, and our team luckily had a chance to work with UX researchers at Microsoft on the Azure SDK documentation project; HCDE 511 though is about the information visualization, the whole design process still applied the UCD throughout the quarter (Quick link to the temporary heroku host — only built for the screen width wider than 1400px and tested in Chrome due to time limitation for implementation.)
A lot more projects and examples that happened in the past quarters could be listed here, which would take too much space. Before coming to UW, I worked as a software engineer. At that time, I was not sure why A|B testing was used everywhere, what prompted product managers to certain changes, and why UX designers suggested a specific workflow and layout. Now I have grasped a general understanding of the rationale behind those actions, and I am eager to learn more as it is a long way to go.
Last, I have limited experience in the field of Artificial Intelligence. During my undergrad study, I have taken two courses related to this field — Intro to Artificial Intelligence and Intro to Machine Learning. Undergrad CS courses have taught me the fundamental theories and implementations in AI, while some of the HCDE projects facilitate my understanding of the real-life application through the Cloud services — the sentiment analysis and unsupervised clustering projects from the HCDE 530 course.
Course Expectation for HCDE 512
From this course — International UX Experience and Communication — I am interested to learn the theories in designing for international communities and anything unknown. The dynamic among culture models, global policies, and the interface design seems to be a black box. I hope this course could reveal the beauty behind the veil and provide us an opportunity to mix the knowledge in HCD, AI, and the international community to strengthen our understanding for future usage.
Modified on Apr. 08 according to the feedback
