About

I love people.

I love talking to them. I love watching them. I love finding out what makes them tick. Every single one of us is different, which makes every single person we meet the beginning of a new journey of discovery.

Perhaps I was an anthropologist in my previous life; but in this one, I’m a user experience consultant. Which suits me just fine because my job requires me to find out what makes people tick and observe how they behave.

I’ve always loved technology and enjoyed using it to improve my digital life. But coding was never my thing; and at the time, it seemed to me that coding was all there was for a career in technology.

Which explains why I’m ever grateful to my HCI professor for opening my eyes to a whole new world that is User Experience. In all my years of education, nothing has piqued my interest quite like user experience research. Nothing.

And that led to vacation jobs improving the usability of companies’ websites and desktop applications. At the time, I didn’t even know what to call myself. Was I a web designer? A web developer? Eventually, I settled for “Usability Engineer” (ala Don Norman’s book).

I learned the hard way of selling the benefits of usability to people who have never even heard of it. Words and presentations were great, but the one way that worked better than most was taking the company’s design, re-working it and showed it to them. People “get” good designs, and thereafter, jobs were easier to get.

Since then, I’ve worked with almost _every_ government agency in Singapore to improve the user experience of their websites. I’ve also worked on projects for mobile companies that truly understand the value user experience research brings.

When I look back at the last 3 years, I’m amazed by what I’ve accomplished; and I’m excited by what I want to do next.

This excerpt was taken from the UserX blog.