Grace Lau

My name is Grace Lau. I am an information architect and user experience designer in sunny smoggy California, where I find inspiration in bettering user frustrations. Well, it depends on the traffic.

My roots

My career in user experience began accidentally. I got my first computer, an IBM Aptiva E26, in 1996 when my mom said that we were going to “look” at computers and came home with one. My first 3 years were focused on desktop publishing, BASIC programming, and basic computer usage. I picked up HTML over a summer break from a library book on HTML 4.0 and started designing websites for school projects and eventually for the Chinese language class at my high school (Incidentally, the design and structure of the site is still the one I set up back in 1998). I also created personal journals online, hand-coding blogs before I knew blogs existed.

Since then, I’ve designed websites for student groups, academia, and non-profits. I focus on the structure and organization of a site’s content and wrapped it up in W3C web standards compliant HTML and CSS. In all of this experience, I have not considered myself to be a real web-designer since I knew a little of most things, enough to get a site going, but not enough to consider myself a real web-designer.

Information is my passion…

…and sharing it with others was what I wanted to do. I fell into User Experience after I completed my BA in political science at UCLA and was looking for a career path not involving law or medicine. I looked into library science and was excited. I saw ‘information architecture’ on the department program and was hooked.

In 2007 I completed my Masters in Library and Information Science at UCLA. I specialized in Informatics, with special interests in information architecture, usability, and user experience. In my MLIS portfolio, I write about fostering usable experiences and creating communities of practice in online gaming.

My process

I am a computer geek, a constant organizer, and a productivity geek. I am passionate about what I do – making life more enjoyable through the products we use, whether it is on an online environment or in physical space.

As a freelancer, I work in an agile environment. Sketch on paper, discuss things through with my clients, develop overnight, hypercare, repeat and conduct user research throughout. It’s probably not the best way – not secure, not stable, but my clients appreciate being able to see results immediately and watch the creative process develop. You can see some of my iterative work @ my flickr site.