A LITTLE DREAMER
My childhood was embroidered with an unanticipated influence for the road I now travel. Ignited, lifted, and split into spectacular pieces of color, depth, movement and meaning, fireworks captured my young heart with enchantment. As I attempted to record these fascinating and evanescent experiences on canvas, my little dream to become an artist was born. Through the years, my father, an electronic engineer, taught me the rigors of the pursuit of truth and the necessity for close attention to detail via the avenues of science and technology. I could not help being curious about every scientific principle behind nature.
A PERSEVERANT LEARNER
The combination of two aspects, art and science, has provided me with an interdisciplinary foundation that coalesces within my college studies in computer science. Channeling inner creativity all along the process of methodical analysis, practical programming and quantitative evaluation is non-trivial work. Fortunately, I overcame these difficulties by being a perseverant learner. For example, I not only implemented the core algorithm but also designed a user interface for a handle-based mesh deformation application in undergraduate school. In graduate school, I published papers concerning procedural content generation in computer games. It was a guidance for game designers to balance in-game level-difficulty, coverage, and representation of realistic behaviours. It would help enhance a player’s gaming experience and ultimately make more profit out of the game.
A NEW PURSUER
I realized the importance of UX design during my recent work in Chongqing where I co-founded a startup. We built a 3D printing web application called Tran3D. It serves as a platform facilitating transactions between 3D printer owners and people who want to make 3D prints. As a developer, I found our website structure-wise disorganized at the beginning. To solve this, I started combining the ideas from UX design. Apart from programming, my responsibility includes defining target users and product goals, investigating competitors, coordinating different perspectives from the team, making decisions on design frameworks, interviewing people to finite interaction details and gathering feedback to evaluate my work. In summary, research, design, implementation and reviewing became essential phases in each iteration of my whole developing process. Working as a UX designer provided me a venue to creatively combine my aesthetic view with my scientific foundation and I really enjoyed it.
I am a new pursuer to create better user experience. However, I do have the passions for creativity, analytical thinking and storytelling, all of which are aligned with the core elements of UX design. Therefore, I feel great confidence and hope for what lies ahead on my road. The evolving world of web products is where I want to identify the essence, deliver the story and solve the problem using the knowledge of UX design. In this way, I can share my independent thought and unique voice with others with the hope of inspiring the same level of enchantment in their lives that I still carry in mine.
ABOUT THIS SITE
qihanxu.com is coded by Qihan in 2017. The site is built with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub. HTML files are preprocessed from Pug while CSS files from Sass. Credits to Raw & Rendered for frontpage images and Bootcdn.com for jquery and lazysizes libraries.