Human–computer interaction postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My degree in Psychology with Computing let me study memory, attention and perception alongside programming, and by my second year I found I was most interested in the space between the two: how people actually behave in front of an interface rather than how designers assume they will. A master's in human-computer interaction is the natural next step, because I want to move from noticing usability problems to studying and testing them properly.

My final-year project looked at how adults over sixty-five navigate mobile banking menus. I recruited eleven participants through a community centre, gave them four tasks on a bank's public demonstration app, and recorded task completion, errors and think-aloud comments. The results were less tidy than I expected. Most difficulties were not about small text or unfamiliar icons, which had been my assumption, but about uncertainty: participants often knew where to tap yet hesitated because they were not sure whether an action could be undone. Several backed out of a correct path and started again. Writing up those findings taught me to separate what I had measured from what I wanted to conclude, and to be careful about drawing strong claims from a small sample. It also showed me how much I enjoy sitting with someone while they use a system and asking why they paused.

Since graduating I have worked full time as a customer support adviser for a small software company, answering tickets and rewriting help-centre articles. The job has been an unexpectedly good grounding. I see the same confusions arrive repeatedly, and I have learned that a well-worded question saves twenty minutes of guesswork, because customers usually describe what they expected rather than what they did. When one form kept generating complaints, I collected a month of related tickets, grouped them by the point at which people got stuck, and passed a short summary to our developers; two of the labels were changed as a result. I do not want to overstate my part in that, but it confirmed that structured evidence is more persuasive than a general sense that something is awkward.

Outside work I taught myself HTML, CSS and enough JavaScript to build and maintain a website for my aunt's sewing group, which mainly involves keeping a workshop calendar and photo gallery usable on old phones. Watching members use it has been more instructive than any of my design choices. I also help my grandfather with his tablet, for video calls and ordering prescriptions. Repeating the same steps with him has made me attentive to how much of an interface depends on remembering invisible conventions, and to the difference between someone being unable to do something and being unwilling to risk getting it wrong.

My reading has grown from this. Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things gave me the vocabulary of affordances and signifiers that I now use almost daily, and Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think sharpened my interest in low-cost testing. More recently I have been reading about accessibility guidelines and about inclusive design, which has made me want a firmer grounding in research methods, statistics and prototyping than I could get on my own.

On a master's I am keen to strengthen my experimental design and qualitative analysis, work on team projects with people from design and engineering backgrounds, and take a dissertation on trust and reversibility in interfaces used by less confident users. Afterwards I hope to work as a user researcher, ideally on public-facing services where getting things wrong has real consequences for people.