Faezeh Bahmani

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I am a well-versed user experience designer and researcher skilled at finding UX problems, uncovering user needs, designing solutions, and shaping product decisions. With my academic training in scientific research, both qualitative and quantitative, I pride myself on instilling the rigor of science into practical user experience design.

About Me

UX Researcher & UX Designer

Degree
Master's in Human-Computer Interaction
Email
info@faezehbahmani.com
Current Position
Senior UX designer with Sun Life

What I'm Doing

UX Design

Designing the UX of products from A to Z is something that I love doing!

UX Audit

I am here to help with evaluating the UX of products and coming up with suggestions for improvement!

UX Mentorship

Guiding those passionate in the field of design is fun!

My Resume

Experience

Senior UX Designer

May 2023 - Present

Sun Life

Senior UX Designer

June 2021 - May 2023

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC)

Product Design Lead

Feb. 2020 - Feb. 2021

Securities and Exchange Organization

UX Design, Product Design and Design Thinking Mentor

Feb. 2019 - Feb. 2021

Sematec Professional IT Training Center, Docent Academy

Senior UX Auditor, Researcher and Designer

Dec. 2018 - Feb. 2020

Freelancer

Software Developer and Systems Support Engineer

Feb. 2017 - May 2019

MTN Irancell (a telecommunication operator with more than 38 million subscribers)

Product Owner

Nov. 2014 - Jan. 2017

Mobile Telecommunication Company Of Iran (MCI) (a telecommunication operator with more than 65 million subscribers)

Graduate Research Assistant

Sep. 2011 - June 2014

Oregon State University

Product Designer and Software Developer

Sep. 2005 - Sep. 2011

Mapna Group

Education

Master of Human-Computer Interaction

2011 - 2014

Novel Approaches to Promoting End-User Programming

Corvallis, Oregon, US

Oregon State University

Bachelor of Software Engineering

2003 - 2008

The Design and Implementation of a Computerized Maintenance Management System

Tehran, Iran

Shahid Beheshti University

Tools

Adobe XD

Figma

Adobe Photoshop

Blender

Balsamiq

Hotjar

Google Analytics

Adobe Analytics

RStudio

WordPress

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

Latex

Github

Optimal Workshop

User Testing

Miro

Programming

Java

Bootstrap

HTML5

CSS3

My Experience

Here are some of the companies where I have worked in the field of software engineering:

Mobile Telecommunication Company of Iran

Iran Power Plant Projects Management Company

My projects in the field of UX design and research were either part of my role with these businesses or were funded by them.
As my UX design portfolio is confidential, feel free to get in touch if interested.

Here are some of my visual mockups for a cargo shipping website:

Register good details and select forwarder companies

My Articles

When, Where, and How to Use Modals in UX Design

17-03-2023

This story addresses the problem of overusing modals in UX design by drawing designers’ attention to all tools they have in their toolbox in addition to modals. Modals are overused on the web today. Looking closely at their use cases, it is easy to realize that there are misconceptions among designers around their proper application. Read more on Medium...

Tooltips

23-03-2021

As part of the Securities and Exchange Organization website redesign, I was poking around websites like https://www.sca.gov.ae. I came across a common UX oversight. As shown in part 1 above, hovering on words such as “regulations” showed a tooltip which did not provide additional information and merely repeated the word. This is a misuse of Read more...

UX in Daily Life

24-01-2021

One of my favorite topics is UX in daily life – the experience of interacting with everyday objects. It is the quality of this experience that makes us say things like “Too bad I have to operate this thing again!” We can actually design websites and applications using ideas borrowed from the UX design of Read more...

My Academic Papers

General Principles for a Generalized Idea Garden

01/04/2017
Journal of Visual Languages and Computing (JVLC), 51-65

Many systems are designed to help novices who want to learn programming, but few support those who are not necessarily interested in learning programming. This paper targets the subset of end-user programmers (EUPs) in this category. We present a set of principles on how to help EUPs like this learn just a little when they need to overcome a barrier. We then instantiate the principles in a prototype and empirically investigate them in three studies: a formative think-aloud study, a pair of summer camps attended by 42 teens, and a third summer camp study featuring a different environment attended by 48 teens. Finally, we present a generalized architecture to facilitate the inclusion of Idea Gardens into other systems, illustrating with examples from Idea Garden prototypes. Results have been very encouraging. For example, under our principles, Study #2’s camp participants required significantly less in-person help than in a previous camp to learn the same amount of material in the same amount of time.

A Principled Evaluation for a Principled Idea Garden

18/10/2015
Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 235-243

Many systems are designed to help novices who want to learn programming, but few support those who are not interested in learning (more) programming. This paper targets the subset of end-user programmers (EUPs) in this category. We present a set of principles on how to help EUPs like this learn just a little when they need to overcome a barrier. We then instantiate the principles in a prototype and empirically investigate the principles in two studies: a formative think-aloud study and a pair of summer camps attended by 42 teens. Among the surprising results were the complementary roles of implicitly actionable hints versus explicitly actionable hints, and the importance of both context-free and context-sensitive availability. Under these principles, the camp participants required significantly less in-person help than in a previous camp to learn the same amount of material in the same amount of time.

Principles of a Debugging-First Puzzle Game for Computing Education

28/07/2014
Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 57-64

Although there are many systems designed to engage people in programming, few explicitly teach the subject, expecting learners to acquire the necessary skills on their own as they create programs from scratch. We present a principled approach to teach programming using a debugging game called Gidget, which was created using a unique set of seven design principles. A total of 44 teens played it via a lab study and two summer camps. Principle by principle, the results revealed strengths, problems, and open questions for the seven principles. Taken together, the results were very encouraging: learners were able to program with conditionals, loops, and other programming concepts after using the game for just 5 hours.

End-User Programmers in Trouble: Can the Idea Garden help them to help themselves?

15/04/2013
Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 151-158

End-user programmers often get stuck because they do not know how to overcome their barriers. We have previously presented an approach called the Idea Garden, which makes minimalist, on-demand problem-solving support available to end-user programmers in trouble. Its goal is to encourage end users to help themselves learn how to overcome programming difficulties as they encounter them. In this paper, we investigate whether the Idea Garden approach helps end-user programmers problem-solve their programs on their own. We ran a statistical experiment with 123 end-user programmers. The experiment's results showed that, even when the Idea Garden was no longer available, participants with little knowledge of programming who previously used the Idea Garden were able to produce higher-quality programs than those who had not used the Idea Garden.

End-user Programmers on the Loose: A study of programming on the phone for the phone

01/09/2012
Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 75-82

Microsoft TouchDevelop is a programming environment enabling users use their phones to create scripts that run on the mobile phones. This is achieved via a semi-structured editor and a programming language with several distinctive features, such as support for using smartphone hardware. In order to uncover opportunities for future tool development aimed at facilitating end-user programming of phones on phones, we have investigated the kinds of scripts that people are creating with the current tool set as well as what problems they ask for help with solving. This paper is the first to study how end-user programmers “in the wild” are programming mobile phones. In particular, no previous study has investigated the ways in which end users programmatically use mobile phones’ special hardware (e.g., GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope) for practical everyday purposes. We discovered that, in essence, people are using TouchDevelop to create apps: downloadable applications with small, fairly reliable feature sets that take advantage of mobile hardware. In addition, we identified several areas for further innovation aimed at enhancing the programming tool and the online repository where users share scripts with one another.

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