A Chat with Aaron Soto, Graduate of UC Irvine’s Master of Human-Computer Interaction and Design
Aaron Soto graduated from UC Irvine’s MHCID program in 2017. He’s currently a Senior Partner Solutions Architect at AWS and has over 20 years of experience in cloud solutions architecture, user experience design, and web application development. When not tinkering with tech, Aaron enjoys the outdoors — hiking with his family or playing golf badly with his dad.
Before MHCID, had you ever worked remotely for a substantial period of time?
Yes. I started my own web and application development consultancy when I was doing my undergraduate work in 1998, and pretty much worked remotely in various different flavors for the next 20 years or so. We did have an office for certain periods of time, and I did do a lot of work on-site with certain clients, so it was definitely a mix of on-site and remote work.
How did the MHCID program and studying remotely prepare you for a COVID-19 work situation?
Well, what I thought worked really well was the overall guidance we received because the vast majority of the program was intentionally remote. Dr. Gillian Hayes provided a number of really high-level tips and guidance and best practices. And the program was designed so that Drs. Judy and Gary Olson were available to us. Judy Olson delivered lectures in-person specifically on remote work. The Olsens were very kind and generous with their time. It was really neat to be able to sit down and have lunch with them, and be able to chat with Judy Olsen about a lecture she’d just given and receive additional insights from her.
Dr. Melissa Mazmanian’s work sits at the intersection of HCI and business. I think a lot of what she was able to teach us was very helpful as well. To me, overall, all of these things together provided formal theory and best practices to the things I had been doing. I certainly realized a number of points where I could do better.
What’s something you thought would be a problem studying remotely that wasn’t an issue after all?
We had five people on my capstone team. Four of us were local, and so I was a little concerned about the fifth remote person, but it really worked out just fine. We had a lot of tools available to us in terms of communication, when four of us got together in SoCal and the fifth person connected remotely.
We set up video conferencing so that the remote person would have visual cues into the meetings and could see the whiteboards we were using. The remote person sent their sketches in through Slack so the rest of the team could see them. It actually worked out very well.
Do you have a tip about working at home that you would want to share?
Yes, and it’s something that I myself am bad at, but I think it’s important to try to separate your home life and your work life. For people working from home remotely before COVID, I think that was a more straightforward thing to do, but because of COVID, especially for people that have children in the home, it’s much more difficult. But the separation is the thing that I would encourage people to try to do.
Make sure you get up, take a shower, get dressed as you would if you were going to work, and try to have a separate workspace that you can go to. Also, try to have an end time so that when you are done, you can then get that mental break.
Do you have a tip about virtually working with a team?
One really cool time when I most directly used learnings from MHCID was in planning a design sprint with my team. This was in February or March, whenever things started to get bad [with covid]. We had planned to have an in-person event with the team in San Francisco. We were going to co-locate for three days and do a number of things, including this design sprint. That’s the background.
About three or four days before this was supposed to happen, we all decided to switch to a remote event. I had to reschedule everything that I had planned. That’s when I began pulling on the specific skills for working remotely I learned in the MCHID program. When you’re talking about a design sprint, you’re talking about physical mediums, like papers and whiteboard and things like that. I think the key that really made it successful was knowing that I needed to build in extra time between things that would have otherwise been contiguous so that we could compile the sketches from the different people in a way so they could then be shared.
When everybody is together and doing sketches on paper, you can just look at them, you can throw them up on a whiteboard, but working remotely, I needed everybody to send them in to me. I needed time to compile them on to a virtual whiteboard so that we could discuss them. So building in that break of just 15 to 20 minutes so I could compile everybody’s material and then present it back to the group for collaboration was enough to allow us to have the same actual work experience and get the same output from the event, but in a virtual way.
What do you think work will look like five years from now?
I think it’s going to be pretty different. Where I work now, we see a lot of our customers accelerating their cloud transformation and essentially telling their workers that they can probably work from home indefinitely, like this is going to be the new normal. You see this in the news quite a bit. We don’t want to be a commercial real estate investor right now. I think a lot of this is going to stick and be permanent going forward.
