How have your prior activities and experiences prepared you for this program and this field? Please provide specific examples.
I’m a Caucasian woman in my twenties, an embodiment of a common user persona for product development. But during my time living in Beijing, I understood for the first time how it felt to be forgotten by the designers that had developed the technology around me. Trying to complete everyday tasks, I was consistently the odd one out: I could not purchase train tickets online because my official name on my government documents is 16 letters, but the payment form only accepted names with 10 characters or less; I could not buy rubbing alcohol at the pharmacy after getting my ears pierced because the purchasing system required an ID number which my passport number could not satisfy; waiting to see a doctor, the automated system severely garbled my name as it called me from the waiting room because my name is not written with Chinese characters. These use cases are low-hanging fruit to an experienced product designer, but having encountered them personally, I had a realization: every design choice in a product impacts each user differently.
Those three systems I encountered in Beijing successfully target all 1.4 billion Chinese nationals, but I am not one of those 1.4 billion people. My problems and my experiences were unique to me. With this new understanding, I realized there are countless other users each experiencing these same products differently, and this can be abstracted out to all users and all products. As a result, the questions that drive me are: How can I design an experience that addresses the subjectivity of an individual user’s experience? How can I empathize with a user and understand her goals and challenges using a product and better envision a solution when I simply am not her? How can I understand what problems she needs solving before she is even a user of this future product?
Drawing from my experiences in China, I use these questions to drive the core of my engineering solutions as a web developer at Microsoft. For example, when a user reaches my webpage, several pieces of information must load, and I need to optimize the load time on my system while considering which piece of information the user wants to see first and why. What is the user’s end goal on my website? Is there a more direct way I can deliver the user to that goal based on the information they need? Every user is different, and even if the vast majority (such as 1.4 billion people) can have their needs met through a common experience, I want to embrace any edge cases that need a deeper understanding in order to accommodate the “odd ones out.” I want the product experiences I design to satisfy all users, or at the very minimum, provide them a path to reach their goal.
Now that I understand this concept of usability on both a technical and personal level, and have had the opportunity to inject these lessons into my professional work, I am ready to advance toward engaging in interaction design and user research at a deeper level, as well as gain more understanding about product usability and prototype development.
Please describe your interest in Human Centered Design & Engineering and explain what specific elements of the program make it a good fit for you. How will this program assist you in your longer-term goals? Please provide specific examples.
The Human Centered Design & Engineering program stands out to me for its targeted learning in the intersection of design, engineering, and user research. I have a background in software engineering, but my academic exposure to interaction design and user research has mostly been limited to theory. With HCD+E’s primarily team- and project-based curriculum, I am excited for the opportunity to work with and learn from classmates with backgrounds different from my own while simultaneously bringing project prototypes to fruition. At Microsoft, I have gained familiarity with the team dynamics that are common and necessary to solve problems in real-world settings. This program’s focus on teamwork in a professional environment would benefit me in a way that is tangential to the course material, allowing me to hone the collaboration skills that I already use every day. I am also an advocate for diversity of opinions and viewpoints when it comes to problem-solving, and I look forward to working alongside the many international classmates in the program who have likely faced similar usability problems that I have experienced while living abroad.
The wide variety of electives and the opportunities for research align with my interests. The upcoming Directed Research Group courses are targeted and compelling — specifically Dr. Kim and Dr. Sanocki’s “The Psychology of User Experience” spotlights the facet of HCI in which I am most interested: understanding user needs at a core, psychological level to better infer and address product use cases and challenges. Beyond the Directed Research Groups, HCD+E’s outlined research areas, such as “Influencing Behavior, Thinking, and Awareness” provide ample space for me to explore my interest in the intersection of human behavior, culture, and technology. Similarly, the research topic of “Design for Emergent Collaborations and Organizations” also appeals to me due to my background in Chinese culture and interest in communication across cultural divides, specifically stemming from my experiences in Beijing. As the world becomes more connected due to the increased influence of the Internet, and especially as accurate, real-time translations become commonplace in tools such as Skype, there will be a growing intercultural communication and collaboration gap in which I am interested in bridging with technology.
Ultimately, the HCD+E program is an opportunity to gain relevant user research and interaction design experience. Within Microsoft, the majority of HCI work I am passionate about is conducted in the AI and Research organization (formerly Microsoft Research). To better engage my background and interests, I want to leverage HCD+E’s research opportunities to pursue a role in the AI+R org or in another tech company’s research division. I understand the HCD+E program is targeted at industry roles, but if through the program I fall in love with the research process, I would strongly consider pursuing a PhD in the HCI field in the future.
At Microsoft, there are ample opportunities for me to apply the skills I will gain from this program. This could mean designing the next Microsoft Surface smart table, engineering experiences for the web on HoloLens, or assisting cross-cultural communication across Skype, Microsoft Teams, or even in the social media realm with LinkedIn. Tying in my Chinese background, I could also apply these skills internationally and design product experiences for Western and Chinese companies that are moving to capture each other’s audiences. The HCD+E program’s offerings are so diverse that it is challenging to determine which niche I would most enjoy. Among guided research, team courses, and targeted learning, I’m determined to gain the knowledge I need to move toward a more user-centric and design-oriented career.
