Valentina Calabrese | Creative Software Engineer

Hey there, it's been a while since I haven't updated the blog, but here I am with a few updates. 📰

I started my first semester at Georgia Tech in January with a class in Human Computer Interaction, and I gotta say that so far I am truly enjoying the material and how the class is structured since it makes the remote learning experience much more enjoyable.

There's a lot of writing 📝 involved with this class as each single week we're required to write an 8 pages paper related to the course content we're learning, but I think that overall having to write this much was helpful for me in that it gave me structure and room to properly organize myself with my full-time job at Cloud Academy.

Having less time at hand paradoxically makes you value the time you have much more, and this helped me establish a good routine to take care of both HW and my daily work as a FE Engineer (also WFH is a boost in this scenario as there is no commute).

Anyhow, some of the main key takeaways from the HCI course are:

Think about users first anytime you're thinking about creating a new interface for a product.

Ask yourself he right questions early on, and iterate as much as possible to refine the feedback cycle and come up with creative alternative solutions.

Brainstorming is important, and you have to take it as a creative exercise as inserting a "random" element can actually allow you to think outside the box and find new ways to tackle a certain problem.

Beware of biases, as you will encounter so many of them along the way and the more you know about them the better you will be able to recognize them.

Get comfortable with the concepts of gulf of execution and gulf of evaluation as they are vital points which will eventually determine the overall perceived usability of your interface/product.

Hope you found these points somewhat helpful/insightful, and I will come back with more takeaways once the class is over in May so stay tuned for that! ✨