Susan Zhuang, Human-Computer Interaction MSc
I was awarded my BSc in Psychology in 2011 and my MSc in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with Ergonomics in 2012.
Course: Human-Computer Interaction MSc
I am now a Senior User Experience (UX) Designer at POKE London, where I use insights about human behaviour and cognition to design products and services that are intuitive to use, meaningful, useful, and engaging.
All the theoretical and practical knowledge, skills and experience I picked up at UCL have helped me in my career in UX in some way or another. Particularly helpful was the strong encouragement from the department to publish our student projects in academic journals; its strong connections to industry exposing us to not only the academic side of the field but the commercial side as well; and the strong emphasis on practical group work and collaboration across both Psychology and HCI.
PALS as a division and its world-leading focus on very diverse fields within cognitive science allowed me to discover the field of HCI early on during my undergraduate degree, and subsequently UX as a discipline in industry.
Moreover, UCLIC’s excellent and progressive research capabilities within HCI made me discover the plethora of real-world technological applications cognitive psychology can have, ranging from medical equipment to interactive museum exhibitions to web interfaces – fuelling my ambition to help design a better world.
Of many of my most memorable moments as a student at UCL was probably when we entered one of our group projects during my MSc – involving the research, design and prototype of an interactive tactile device – into the CHI Student Design Competition. It was picked out for the semi-finals and allowed us all to travel to the CHI conference in Austin, Texas to present it. It was so fantastic to see and hear all these HCI rock stars we’d all been studying, including Don Norman and Ben Shneiderman, and to be exposed to the cutting edge of research and engineering within HCI.
Every time a product or service I’ve worked on goes to market and users tell us how useful it is or how easy it is to use or how it’s just a delightful experience to them, I feel proud of what I do for a living. I’m also very proud of how quickly I’ve advanced in my career, being exposed to a wide variety of clients – ranging from the promising start-ups to massive global brands -, being given lots of responsibility early on, and having grown massively as a human being as a result.
I love being a UCL alumna because of the truly global network of friends I have ended up with. Moreover, the immense diversity of the entire UCL experience – from the types of subjects taught, to the cultural experiences London offers, to the different perspectives on life, arts, sciences, politics, religion the diversity of UCL allows has significantly shaped my world view. Being a UCL alumna makes me open minded towards, able to think critically about, and empathetic to other individuals, societies, cultures, and ideas.