Meet UX & Front-end Consultant Anne Marie
You probably haven’t had the chance to meet Anne Marie yet, since she works mostly behind the scenes.
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You probably haven’t had the chance to meet Anne Marie yet, since she works mostly behind the scenes. However, you may have already come across her in the blog about our office dog Pip! Anne Marie has been working at Grexx for almost four years as a UX & Front-end Consultant and has had significant influence on the look and feel of Grexx platform.
Creative nerd at heart.
Anne Marie studied Communication and Multimedia Design at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. In her previous roles, she worked as a creative director for startup and as a freelancer building websites on the complex side: an expert in not only strong designs but in beautiful and seamless with other systems.
Anne Marie: "As a freelancer, I liked the idea of creating really beautiful websites that are easy to maintain and systems that take as much work out of your hands as possible. I have always been very interested in what people want to achieve; as a freelancer and as a creative, you quickly learn that the initial customer demand is rarely what someone needs. Asking questions, empathizing, making your client think, that's what I liked about my job.
After a few years, I was eager to learn new things and grow further in the technical field, to master more programming and languages and get a little more involved in UX (User Experience). That's how I ended up at Grexx, because what I could and wanted to learn was exactly what they were looking for."
"No puzzle is unsolvable."
"Actually, what I love most is solving puzzles, both in UX and front-end that comes back a lot, and both in code and design. I'm pretty fanatical. If I see something that's not right, I must fix it. Sometimes that can take a while, but most of the time I figure it out. I've really learned a lot in terms of programming over the past few years. In my college days, I thought it didn't suit me, but that wasn't really based on anything. A few years ago, I got more interested in it and I now build a lot in Grexx Studio, which itself is built with the Grexx Platform.
Over the past four years, we have made tremendous design changes. The complete look and feel of the low-code studio and the platform have been addressed. From house style, logo, and colors and so on, to the routes we let users take on the platform. Of course, we want users to be able to easily put something together themselves, without code, so that means we must empathize with all possible user cases behind the scenes. Lately I've been working a lot on the new WYSIWYG editor, which stands for What you see is what you get. That's going to help people easily tweak the design of their application themselves."
User focus.
"I would like to delve further into UX in the near future, and I also see many opportunities to further improve the platform in that. We have focused on rebuilding the platform over the past few years and I would now like to focus more on refining the user experience and testing user patterns. It's important to know how people interact with your software, what they expect and where they might get stuck. Like it or not like it is subjective, I don't find that very interesting. Whether the software works as people expect, whether they go through it intuitively, that's more important to me."
Social type.
"I'm in the office two days a week. I used to live in Amsterdam, then I was in the office every day, but yes, then corona came, and we sat at home for a long time. Then I decided to move to Deventer with my girlfriend as she got a job nearby and I'm from there. It's an hour's drive to the office, but twice a week is fine. Pip always goes with me, of course, and I listen to a podcast to pass time in the car.
Actually, I really like being in the office. If I still lived in the neighborhood, I would probably be there more often. I'm quite a social type and what I like is that we really work together. In my DevOps team everyone has their own tasks and expertise. Of course you handle your own work, but we test each other's issues and think with each other. You never do it alone. We are all working on something big - that's what I missed as a freelancer. A common goal that we all contribute to. That works nicely."
Private life.
Anne Marie (31) lives with her girlfriend Stephanie and dog Pip in Deventer. They love to be outdoors: discovering new places, taking the tent on a road trip, long-boarding or playing tennis. Anne Marie also enjoys gardening, gaming, and socializing.
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