My Journey into Human-Computer Interaction

  HCI Blog 5 Building the hi-fidelity prototype for DriveShare felt like the moment where everything finally came together—our user research, the medium-fidelity sketches, and all the messy feedback we collected in between. This stage wasn’t just about making the app look better; it was about understanding what makes an interface trustworthy, intuitive, and good enough for real people to use. Using Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics as my guide, this was the first time I felt like a real product designer—someone who listens, iterates, and reshapes a design based on evidence, not assumptions. This blog reflects on how I evaluated the medium-fidelity design, the usability flaws we uncovered, and how the DriveShare experience transformed into a cleaner, more reliable prototype. It also touches on what this taught me about UX, and how these lessons shape my future as an AI product engineer. 1. Evaluating the UI with Nielsen’s Heuristic Evaluation To evaluate our medium-fidelity pr...

  Rapid Prototyping After weeks of research and conceptual design, it finally felt like time to bring DriveShare to life. Until this point, DriveShare existed as a shared idea — a parking app that lets homeowners rent their driveways to drivers looking for affordable parking. But rapid prototyping turned that concept into something tangible, something I could touch, test, and learn from. The First Attempt: Turning the Idea into Reality Our first version was anything but polished — and that’s what made it exciting. We started with paper sketches to map out the user flow: the home screen, the map with available driveways, and a simple “Book Now” button. These hand-drawn screens helped us visualize the experience quickly, without worrying about pixels or code. Once we had a few sketches we liked, I moved them into  Figma  to create a clickable digital prototype. It was minimalistic — no fancy animations, no deep backend — just the essentials: A map interface with pins sh...

  Introduction In my previous blog, I reflected on how user research helped my team rethink our direction and move from an AR Cooking Assistant to a more practical, everyday concept: DriveShare —a peer-to-peer parking app that allows homeowners to rent out their driveways to drivers looking for affordable, reliable parking. This blog is about the creative process that followed—how our team transformed research findings into a visual story through brainstorming, design planning, and finally, our DriveShare concept video . The journey taught me that bringing an idea to life isn’t only about visuals or technology—it’s about empathy, storytelling, and making the design feel real. From Idea to Solution: Shaping the Concept After completing our user interviews, we discovered that trust and safety mattered as much as cost. That finding shifted how we defined DriveShare’s core purpose: not just to make parking cheaper, but to make it predictable and secure for both drivers and homeo...

Introduction In my first blog, I talked about my journey into HCI and our initial project idea: an AR Cooking Assistant to help people prepare sushi. While that concept was fun and creative, my team and I realized that we wanted to tackle a problem closer to everyday life and more practical in scale. That’s how we pivoted to DriveShare —a peer-to-peer app where homeowners can rent out their driveways to drivers looking for affordable, reliable parking. This blog reflects on how user research shaped that pivot, guided our design, and deepened my understanding of what it means to create with people in mind. My Research Journey When we first imagined DriveShare, our thinking was simple: parking is expensive and stressful, while driveways often sit empty. It felt like an easy win—drivers would pay less, and homeowners would make some extra money. But when I began interviewing people, I quickly learned the reality was more complicated. One of the most revealing conversations was with Mike J...

Who I Am & Where I’m Headed My name is Rustam (Russ), and I’m a graduate student in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at San Francisco State University. My story so far has been about curiosity and growth—moving from my roots in Azerbaijan and Turkey to studying and working in the U.S., balancing school, research, and work. I’ve always been drawn to understanding how people interact with technology. My long-term ambition is to become a designer and researcher who builds AI systems that are not just powerful, but also intuitive, ethical, and human-centered. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) feels like the bridge between technology and the people it serves—and I want to stand on that bridge. Why HCI Excites Me At first glance, HCI might sound technical, but to me, it’s really about people. It’s the study of how humans and computers communicate with each other—through screens, buttons, gestures, or even voice. What excites me most is that HCI combines design, psychology, a...