Welcome!

Me Hello and welcome to my website! My name is Erik, I'm currently a computer science graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign specializing in human computer interaction (HCI). I chose HCI because I like making computers fun and easy to use.

Historically a lot of effort has gone into making computers fast and powerful and feature-rich (which is great), but less attention has been paid to making them work well with humans. That's why we're stuck with all these new high-tech gizmos with billions of features that are a pain to use.

I think the reason for this is that those of us designing computer systems have a tendency to dismiss the user interface element as trivial or something that just has to be "good enough." That's really the wrong attitude because user experience is such a critical element of any computer system. You can't just tack on a UI at the end of the design process and expect it to work well. The whole system has to be designed from the ground up with the user in mind. If including a certain feature is going to make the interface too complex, then it's likely a feature that needs to be scrapped entirely.

It's also about time we stopped dismissing "fun" and "eye-candy" elements of a UI as irrelevant, and instead started recognizing them as important components of a great interface. Let's face it: scrolling through a list on the iPhone makes you smile. Scrolling through a list by repeatedly clicking a tiny plastic key does not. These elements have a direct impact on how much enjoyment we get out of using our electronic devices; and the more we become reliant on these devices, the more this will have a direct impact on our very quality of life.

Anyway, that's my rant philosophy. If you're still here, you can have a look around my site (feel free to yell at me if you think it's too hard to use/read/navigate).