Eli Fares
This article is part of our Alumni Stories series, which focuses on perspectives of graduates of Carleton’s Human-Computer Interaction Master’s program. Today, we are talking to Eli Fares.
Before I joined the HCI Masters program, I was doing my undergraduate in Engineering at Carleton University. I discovered UX and learned about the industry when I did a co-op term at BlackBerry. I realized how important user research is and how a good experience can affect an entire company’s future as we’ve seen in the tech industry again and again. This is what made me want to do a masters in HCI. There are many stakeholders when it comes to building a product but I feel that Product Designers are the real gatekeepers of what goes in a product and what doesn’t.
Coming into the HCI Masters program, I knew very little about what UX actually was. In the span of 2 years, I was able to develop a good foundation to start my UX career with confidence. In my first role after graduating, I was already educating colleagues about best practice and how to conduct proper research so as to not waste hours and money on features customers don’t want. My entire career has been working in start-ups as the sole designer and owning every part of the design process from beginning to end. This helped build up my skills quickly. I am now a Senior Product Designer where I mentor junior designers and teach a UX Design course at a bootcamp in Toronto.
Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or learn more about my work on my website.
Eli’s final UI design for Freenics Inc. access control application