Who I Am
Hello! My name is Chris Esmele and I am a Master’s student at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction program, the second-highest-ranked HCIM program in the nation. I currently manage and create event websites for SEE as the executive Website and Research Director. Outside of class, you can find me shooting documentaries in DC, looking for my favorite records on vinyl, attending community events or photographing concerts for my publication.
What I Do
I devise and envision the front-end frameworks of software through interface design. I work collaboratively with fellow UX personnel and other software specialists to ensure digital products are optimized through an adept interface. I do not create a user experience, rather, invoke one.
How I Do It
When given a problem statement, I begin my discoveries by thinking about the envisioned system itself. What is its purpose in the real world? What benefits does it have as a tangible, digital product? What impact can I have as its designer? Through understanding the cognitive practices of its personas, I complete iterative design cycles fostered to appeal in user empathy and fulfill software objectives. I ensure company principles, developer teams, and users evolve the ongoing design language I deliver in my work.
Photography and UX:
The Worlds of Perception and Experience
If you explored the rest of this website, you’d notice it’s broken into 2 halves, one for my design work in UX and another for my art in photography. These disciplines flourish together, building concepts that would later intertwine and weave into both my art and design processes. These interconnections formed the basis of 2 core elements of my work: perception and experience. However, the phenomenon of art and design offers 2 different purposes: art giving expressive resolve and design giving function. Art has an audience and design has its users. Despite these differences, both are fulfilled with the feedback systems of perceiving compositions and experiencing them. Their conjunction in visual sensation is what impassioned me to pursue both fields.
With photography, I immerse myself in compositional theory, audience recognition, and stylization. This led me into exploring more visual practices in cinematography. Like software, both photography and cinematography involve the infrastructures of front-end and back-end operations. Final images are the product of photography, having audiences witnessing and interacting with only a fraction of the effort that was put into the work. And that’s the point. Photography and videography stray from showing the production equipment used, the raw unedited images, and the many other operations required to produce the images because they shouldn’t have explicit disclosure to the audience (the back-end). The effort is represented in its final product. This final product of an image is what I identify as the front-end of photography. Operational efforts such as booking shoots, scheduling studio spaces, coordinating lighting fixtures, and operating cameras, are the back-end of photography, the foundational development that allows the product to exist the way it is.
Identifying this relationship in photography allowed me to think like a photographer when designing software. A good design can only be produced with a complimentary program. All of the coding and technical work done to complete the operation must be represented and extended through a good design and vice versa. In order to gain the proper perception of a good design, you would need a valuable experience built on its back-end.
