A 10-week seminar series hosted by the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering. Each week features a different guest presentation on current topics in the field. All talks are open to the community. 

View the full series schedule online at hcde.uw.edu/ux.

Andrea Chin (HCDE MS, 2014)
Senior Staff UX Researcher, Achieve

Essential UX: An introduction to non-discretionary experiences

We all have those things we need to do, but don't necessarily want to do.  Paying bills, demystifying health insurance claims, and responding to jury duty summons are examples of non-discretionary experiences, which rarely surprise people for being intuitive.

Many of these non-discretionary experiences have technical and regulatory requirements that are all too frequently frustrating at best and inaccessible at worst for the many people who must interact with them. Despite these challenges, we as a UX community have the greatest potential for making a broad impact in transforming these experiences that most people have to engage with. This talk will discuss some of the core principles to keep in mind when designing and researching non-discretionary experiences, as well as some takeaways from working on non-discretionary experiences in personal finance and education.

Andrea Chin (M.S. HCDE '14) is a senior staff UX researcher at Achieve, a digital personal financial company. She's spent the past decade working in user research at Amazon, Microsoft, McGraw Hill-Education, Capital One, and consulting for fintech startups. She specializes in identifying and evaluating product-market fit in taking first-generation products to market by conducting mixed-methods research that prioritizes creating inclusive and accessible experiences from the earliest stages of the design lifecycle.

Prior to working in UX, she conducted longitudinal research at the intersection of aging, memory, and decision-making at USC and Stanford. She has a bachelor's in psychology and a master's in gerontology from the University of Southern California. In her free time, she is playing D&D, wrangling cats, or making candles.