Jonathan Dalcourt

BS Computer Science May ‘21 (GPA 3.57)

MS Information Studies May ‘22 (GPA 3.84)

Resume

Why Information Studies?

In a world where technology has placed all but the most obscure information just seconds away, the consequences for an annoying user experience are more drastic than ever. In 2013, the iPad rollout of Avon’s software redesign was so difficult to use they not only had to cancel the entire $125 million project, it caused large numbers of their employees to quit in frustration. The effectiveness of poor UX as a bane to a services’ survivability is especially noticeable in new platforms: studies show almost half of users will give up registering for a non-essential service if the process is too difficult. I found this out first hand while conducting user interviews for gathr’s design.

gathr is a social events platform designed with UX in mind first and foremost. While studying the psychology of loneliness for his thesis at UChicago, our CEO Hojung Kim discovered that 47% of Americans suffer from a sense of chronic loneliness, up from a mere 17% in 2000. We set out to find out why we’re becoming more isolated than ever in a world where almost everyone we know is just a text away, and we found that one of the main obstacles to people connecting in real life is the logistics of meeting and planning up. How many times have you been free and bored, but it takes two hours to coordinate everyone’s schedule and agree on what to do and where to meet, and by that point you’d rather just stay inside and finish your show?

If poor UX can contribute to something as dramatic as chronic loneliness in half of Americans, or the cancellation of a $125 million software rollout, how many other ways is poor UX negatively affecting our lives? It wasn’t until I started taking Information Studies classes that I even considered this as a systematic problem rather than a series of frequent nuisances. As more and more of our lives become digitized with the advent of technologies like Virtual and Augmented Reality, the field too becomes more and more integral to our ability to best take advantage of these advancements.

In a time where technology places the whole world just fingertips away, our patience has become accordingly thin: while in the days of dialup taking tens of seconds just to display a simple web page was acceptable, modern users expect the ability to find, access, and stream high-quality videos in that same (or an even smaller) timeframe. Human-Computer Interaction has become more of a priority than ever, and the consequences for ignoring this are clear: the Avons of the world lose hundreds of millions from neglecting their UX, while others like Intuit spend that money acquiring UX-centered services like Mint. I want to stay ahead of the curve in the world of UX—to create services crafted a little more intuitively than Avon’s; a technology designed with human values in mind; a software that will truly benefit the lives of others.