<aside> 🎮 Nancy Zuo, an Information Systems and HCI major currently on a gap semester, is a hackathon pro and game design fanatic who’s had experiences as an Innovation Scholar at the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, a Content Creator for Design Buddies, a Figma Student Leader, and is an Incoming AR Product Design Intern at Meta! Keep reading to learn about her networking tips, hackathon stories, and the motivations behind her interests!
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My dad's an engineer, and my mom's an art teacher, so I've always really liked the creative areas. I’ve also grown up on computers, like through playing games, so I've always had this interest in answering questions like...
- How do you combine technology with design to make it easier to use
- How do people interact with technology?
- And how do you use it to connect people?
Class Experience
That class taught me, basically, everything I know about Figma now, and it also taught me wireframing, prototyping, and the entire design process. I really liked that class because they put people in teams, and there's a project every few weeks. It was a really fast paced and iterative with critiques I received from other people.
Also, Prof. Karen Kornblum was really good at giving feedback and taught me how to give feedback when I look at designs now.
Project
For interaction design overview, there's one project that was like...
- How do you create a voice interface for a self driving car?
- How do we think about someone's trip in a self driving car to a restaurant?
- And how do we get them to a place where they can enjoy the food together in a car in a COVID setting?
Because I hadn’t worked with designing for voice before that, I learned a lot about different problems there are with error management of voice commands. How do we make an Alexa sound more human? Though previously, I was just annoyed at Alexa, after the project, I was thinking, this is really hard because there's so many different ways someone could say something.
Class Experience
Prof. Jason Hong taught a lot of HCI history, including the history of the Internet and how computers and phones evolved to the way they are today. It helped me really understand that this is how we came to be where we are now, and I guess this is what the past is. For the future, we’ll always be looking out for what’s the next usable thing. In the class, I also learned a lot of like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which gave me a sense of how to create websites.
Last week, I went to Boston for MIT Reality Hacks, a VR/AR hackathon. My friends and I made a VR game, where you can draw weapons, and then you can pick them up and fight with them. It's a two player game, where two people have VR headsets. and they each draw their weapon, and say, when your weapon hits the other player's head, they lose points.