Soren Hamby

My mission to change the world with diverse and inclusive design

I've been lucky enough to have the honor of working with some amazing people.I'm here to make things usable
From service design to smoother financial SaaS, I live for making things simple and usable without a 10 page pdf. I also strongly believe in the act of being mindful and emotionally intelligent so that I'm actively eliminating my own bias and preconceptions.
I got into UX by way of a radioactive geocities website. Actually it was just a regular geocities website, I just like to think I'm Spiderman. I learned to code and do very bad photoshop and illustrations for a Tolkien MUSH called Elendor. I would write backstory, game history, poems and songs for new lore, and post it on my website. Before I knew it, I was doing it for my friends. I started editing the school newspaper and working on the yearbook in InDesign. Nearly 2 decades later, I am grateful to have this experience early in life.

I'm very passionate about automation so that people can spend their time on more useful tasks. I also feel strongly about accessibility. As someone that had temporary complete blindness and has permanent partial vision loss and has been living with vision loss in the other eye for some time, I was suddenly in a position to evaluate how unequipped the world is to accommodate someone with a vision impairment or mobility restriction. I have made it my mission to make the teams I work on more aware and more in tune with the needs of users not like them. Now that I can see, I'm aware of all the things that I took for granted as a sighted person and can point them out to developers and designers. I'm excited to be able to make a difference and turn a scary experience into something that can help my users.

I'm also passionate about diversity and inclusion. As someone that has faced issues with inclusion, how companies treat data and the effect on dignity and humanity of users is all part of the experience. Whether they are from a blended family, are multiracial, are using assistive tools, are part of a gender or sexual minority, or have a learning disability, I want to design so that their experience is smooth and usable. Surprise and delight is all I hear about, but popups and puppies feel like gimmicks when we don't have real usability. That's something that would delight me, something usable.

When I'm not designing, I'm hanging out with my friends at Rocklandpoets events (I promise I'm a better poet after 20 years), small local band shows, or events at Rockland County Pride Center. Solo pursuits find me reading , writing on the internet, and doing grad school. I'm also collecting enamel pins and practicing my mobile photography for my topical accounts growing different cultivars of gourmet oyster mushrooms or capturing my cat's antics. On occasion I also speak at indie conferences or startups. Read Less