I am a usability engineer with a psychology degree behind me, finishing an M.Sc. at Rhine-Waal. I research and evaluate how people actually use things, on a screen and off it: interviews, think-aloud sessions and usability testing, carried through to what the evidence changed. Each case study below says what the testing moved, and what it did not.
M.SC. USABILITY ENGINEERING · B.SC. PSYCHOLOGY
I was the kid who took things apart. Toys first, then anything else within reach, and eventually my PC, my laptop, and my keyboard, which I still can't leave alone.
Somewhere along the way I started noticing that some things simply feel right to use, and others fight you the whole way. I didn't have the vocabulary for it then, only opinions: a running commentary on what was wrong with everything and exactly how I'd fix it.
The other half was people. I studied psychology because I wanted to understand how the mind actually works, and the most useful thing I took from it is that what someone says they want and what they actually want are rarely the same sentence. You have to watch, not just ask.
Usability engineering is where those two halves met. It gave me the process I'd been missing: how things get made, why they end up the way they do, how to improve them, and how to put them in front of real people to find out whether any of it worked.
Off the screen, I make coffee and tea with more equipment than strictly necessary, lose more evenings to Dota 2 than I'll admit, and have a permanent soft spot for pixel art and anything retro. Which is roughly why this site looks the way it does.