The story of Kristina, an HCI ergonomist from Paris
Our today's article is about Kristina Puškarić who currently works and lives in Paris. We are very happy that she visited the Conference “Let’s grow” in Pula and gave us the opportunity to get to know and connect. Kristina is a charismatic and very pleasant person, once a fellow citizen of Pula who, after graduating from high school, continued her education and life outside of Croatia. She studied in Milan and Paris, where she acquired her professional knowledge and works as an HCI Ergonomist today. For a wider audience UX designer / UX researcher: "When people work, search or buy something, they interact with their environment. My job is to adapt the environment to the people's activities. It doesn't matter what kind of environment is. But I'm specialized in IT interfaces. And that's why we call it Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)."
Kristina Puškarić Santini
In order to get a broader picture and understand what Kristina's work entails, we asked her to briefly tell us her story, which we share with you in its entirety:
“In the last 5 years in France, most HCI ergonomists have changed their name to UX researcher. The law of the market probably. But the business is always the same, that has never changed and the French have been really successful in that since the end of World War II. This is mostly visible in the car and aircraft industry.
I love my job very much and above all, I have been living in Paris for the last 22 years because of work and I discovered ergonomics in France. The big city offers plenty of interesting projects, from banking and creating specific business applications, to Disney and B2C applications. Sometimes I feel like a child in a chocolate shop, every project is attractive and there is a lot to offer. Recently, there is a great demand for seniors and lead UX profiles and this gives quite a bit of freedom of choice at the moment, which was not the case 10-15 years ago, for example.
I am currently working for a small agency "La combe du lion vert", about 60 people who are specialized in craft development and want to come to market with a UX offer. As a team leader, I have the task of hiring and educating new people and monitoring their projects with the client. Along the way, I am also a consultant with a client (banking) until the team grows.
My previous experience where I led a design team of 6 people (energy industry) helps me a lot and I withdrew part of that team to a new agency because they are ingenious. Of course, at "La combe du lion vert" there’s a great head hunter team that takes care of finding profiles and an even better commercial department that takes care of finding clients.
In recent years, I have also started working as an educator in specialized schools and colleges for UX design and that fulfills me because knowledge transfer is something that comes as a natural process at a certain age."
And this of course is not all, we could talk for so long, sail into new topics and learn a lot from each other. So we wished for that and arranged a new meeting with Kristina when she visits Pula again.
We believe that her versatility and expertise will inspire you, in case you would like to cooperate or to share your experience, feel free to contact Kristina.