My Story

A developer who designs or a designer who develops?

I was born in the fall of 1989 in Tehran, Iran. I was raised by two engineer parents who saw the benefits of teaching me problem solving techniques from an early age. I was privileged to have grown up building puzzles and playing with legos. I also got a computer when I was five years old and soon learned how to run commands to be able to play my favorite game, Gorillas.

In high school, I was into the theater club but also good at math and physics. I would write, direct and act in plays, also solve the advanced problems my teachers would give me. It was hard for me to know what path I should take as I knew I had an artistic side and a very eager problem solving side, as well.

I ended up going to the Computer Engineering department of Amirkabir University of Technology for my undergrad and it was there that I learned about this new evolving field called Human Computer Interaction (HCI). I started taking a couple of courses in the speciality and quickly realized I wanted to continue my graduate studies learning more about enhancing the human experience.

HCI was still very new in Iran, therefore I decided to apply to schools in the U.S. and Europe. The day I got my admission from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I ran around the house in excitement. My dream had come true!

After school I knew I wanted to do something that helped provide a better user experience for people. I started working at GoDaddy as a mobile developer working closely with the design team. I was still passionate about design, advocating for developers to be more involved in the design process, for sitting on user interviews and be a part of design studios.

I volunteered to work on an idea I had during a design studio, called Conversational Onboarding. The idea of onboarding a user through a conversation. After that experience I realized that I like the user facing aspect of being a developer. And that was when I learned about this new hybrid role called User Experience Developer or sometimes called a Design Technologist.

Today I work as an User Experience Developer at PNC, where I work on designing and developing portals for employees to help them be more efficient.

Work Experience

Education

Languages

Skills

Design Tools

Invision