I’m often asked how I think about user experience. This is one case where a ton of schooling definitely paved the road for how I think today, in a good way.
My graduate degrees are in Industrial & Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech.
Yes, that is a giant turkey mascot.
My favorite class ever was Neuropsychopharmacology at the University of Illinois (nothing to do with Human Factors / Engineering Psychology, but still).
Yes, that is Chief Illiniwek.
Shout out to alma maters complete.
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The Neuropsychopharmacology class was taught by a new prof who was way overeager and caused almost the whole lecture hall to quit after the first week. I loved it. Hardest class I ever took. Also learned how much impact caffeine really has on the body, and more specifically, the brain. (sips more coffee... mmmm... aaaahhhhh...)
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That was undergrad though. The classes that most shaped and inspired how I think about UX today were Optimization I & II. Which basically means kinda how it sounds: optimizing complex systems or processes. Lots of variables and objectives thrown into a computational pot to figure out the “answers” to hard problems. Linear programming, minimizing & maximizing algorithms, multi-objective programming, and more! Loved it. Loved it. Loved it... Yeah, I’m not your typical Ux person.
But wait, maybe I am. I’ve long thought of design & usability as optimization challenges. We’re all trying to optimize products, services, and experiences. Some of us do that through design, others user research, and others with user feedback and usability. Put them all together and you basically have the user-centered design approach. In other words, optimization with the human experience as the maximizing principle.
To me, working on client projects is like playing a bunch of Tetris games with different sets of pieces: user personas, user wants & needs, design goals, business drivers, features & functionality, etc. It’s a basic optimization problem. Well, perhaps not ‘basic’, but then that’s where all the fun comes in!
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To extend this even further, my ultimate UX nirvana is to ‘design’ an experience as a giant puzzle that I can slice and dice into a huge set of Tetris blocks and run an automated super-powered optimization scheme to come up with the very best experience possible.
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For a completely different, equally awesome approach that highlights what I love about EchoUser, see Method or Madness? by Amaya. It’s madness, I say! … And I can optimize that.
Yes, that is a giant turkey mascot.
My favorite class ever was Neuropsychopharmacology at the University of Illinois (nothing to do with Human Factors / Engineering Psychology, but still).
Yes, that is Chief Illiniwek.
Shout out to alma maters complete.
---
The Neuropsychopharmacology class was taught by a new prof who was way overeager and caused almost the whole lecture hall to quit after the first week. I loved it. Hardest class I ever took. Also learned how much impact caffeine really has on the body, and more specifically, the brain. (sips more coffee... mmmm... aaaahhhhh...)
---
That was undergrad though. The classes that most shaped and inspired how I think about UX today were Optimization I & II. Which basically means kinda how it sounds: optimizing complex systems or processes. Lots of variables and objectives thrown into a computational pot to figure out the “answers” to hard problems. Linear programming, minimizing & maximizing algorithms, multi-objective programming, and more! Loved it. Loved it. Loved it... Yeah, I’m not your typical Ux person.
But wait, maybe I am. I’ve long thought of design & usability as optimization challenges. We’re all trying to optimize products, services, and experiences. Some of us do that through design, others user research, and others with user feedback and usability. Put them all together and you basically have the user-centered design approach. In other words, optimization with the human experience as the maximizing principle.
To me, working on client projects is like playing a bunch of Tetris games with different sets of pieces: user personas, user wants & needs, design goals, business drivers, features & functionality, etc. It’s a basic optimization problem. Well, perhaps not ‘basic’, but then that’s where all the fun comes in!
---
To extend this even further, my ultimate UX nirvana is to ‘design’ an experience as a giant puzzle that I can slice and dice into a huge set of Tetris blocks and run an automated super-powered optimization scheme to come up with the very best experience possible.
---
---
For a completely different, equally awesome approach that highlights what I love about EchoUser, see Method or Madness? by Amaya. It’s madness, I say! … And I can optimize that.