
Hi. I think by now you know my name is Jon Chen (it's pretty big up at the top). I honestly don't really know what to put in this section, but it seems to be an imperative to all sites, so here it is
I hope you got a chance to see my portfolio above, it's a random collection of coding, design, and iterative design work both with school and on my own. I guess a little about me is that I am a recent graduate from UC San Diego with a B.S. in Cognitive Science specializing in HCI. I went in as a bio major, decided that I lacked a lot of interest in the health sciences, and decided to go into a more design and computing focused major and voila! Found cognitive science, a beautiful harmony of neuroscience, programming, and design.
At some point I read Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things, and since then I've really enjoy finding everyday tasks that are difficult for the everyday person to do (ie. watching people have trouble opening doors, turning things on, etc.) and this really led to my interest in information architecture and user experience, as I've always had a strong interest in photography.
I really enjoy macro and landscape photography, anything related to the outdoors, and playing praise music on my guitar. Please, feel free to browse around. I know it's not much, but it's all coming :)
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absolute perceptions
Yes, this is the site that you're on right now! This is my personal site where my new ideas and designs are tried out. Entired is coded by hand, and all graphics are designs are done by yours truly. have a look around! :)
http://absoluteperceptions.com
california style events
This was a site developed for a event planning company based in San Diego, CA, and is still under construction pending content, but the design and structure has been completed. The idea was to get a modern, professional feel that would appeal to botht the corporate clients as well as to-be brides.
View a working version of the site in staging!
pan & hsu pediatrics
This site was designed for a private pediatric clinic in Long Beach, CA. They were looking for a modern redesign of their extremely old and busy site. Structure was carried over from old site, but I added more interactivity and brought saliency to important information. This is also pending going live.
View this site in staging!
dance cognition | 2010
This was a web project archiving hundreds of hours choreography and instruction from Wayne McGregor of Random Dance (also director of the Royal Ballet). The goal of this project was to create a searchable archive of videos of Wayne McGregor creating a dance from conception to execution. The site was designed with the intent of other researchers being able to view the videos as well as annotate directly onto the video, to eventually have a network of researchers viewing and analyzing the choreography/learning process. During this process we poured over hours of dance footage as well as interviews with Wayne and dancers about how they interact to learn the dance.
To the left are just a few of the wireframes created to develop this site.
View a framwork of this site! Unfortunately this project is still underway so feel free to peruse the current framework.
action network
This was built as part of COGS 187B course at UC San Diego, where we took on real clients and developed a website from the ground up (from user needs, user experience, client needs, wireframing, storyboarding, etc.) for free. This company was bringing awareness to the San Diego region of the growing issue of child slavery. The website's purpose was to bring easy access to parents and awareness of the dangers that lurk in San Diego.
View a working link of our design!
water faucet redesign | 2010
This was a project for a Human-Computer Interaction course at UC San Diego, where we took an object everybody interacts with every day, examined the system, based on extensive user research, personas, and storyboarding made design recommendations for an improvement on the faucet system. A basic prototype was put on paper based on these recommendations.
View a copy of the report (PDF).
indiana university | 2009
This was a class project done with a small team to redesign the (then) current University of Indiana, Bloomington website. We employed information architecture concepts to bring salience to important aspects of the website, and to make the site easier to navigate as well as have a more pleasant user experience. We used both low and high fidelity wireframes to construct these mockups.
morning style | 2009
This was my very first project that had a focus on user interaction. We created a interface to help users select clothing for the day, and developed the product using extensive user testing, storyboarding, and low/high fidelity prototyping.
View a prototype of the tool!
alton & charissa concept
This was a site designed for a couple that got married in 2009. This was heavy on the graphics and we wanted the users to experience a cute and friendly enviornment as they read through this couple's story. Unfortunately this design did not end up being completely coded out because of time constraints, but I still like it none the less
View the full image here!