About Me

Hi, I’m Chase.#

Here’s a few quick facts about me:

I’m a husband (as of August 2021!), musician, artist, uncle, skier, mountain biker, and avid pickleballer.
I love being outside, traveling, and trying as many vegan restaurants as possible.
Severance is currently my favorite show - if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it! 🤙

I am a computer science graduate from USU and I value simple, usable design. I took a variety of classes throughout my undergrad - from web development to parallel programming to data science. For almost my entire time at USU, I worked in the Learn Explore Design (LED) Lab. I had so many valuable experiences there and I miss working with everyone there.

Norman Doors#

In the lab, I gained an appreciation for human-centered iterative design. One book that really affected me and the way I think about design was Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. In the book, Norman discusses doors (known as Norman Doors) that are designed in a way where it isn’t immediately clear how to open the door.

Once you learn about them, they seem to appear everywhere. I love what Norman says about a well-designed door in the video though - that you shouldn’t even have to consciously think about the fact you are going through a door. It’s completely natural.

Good software interactions are the same way - you shouldn’t have to think twice or second guess yourself when using it. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Norman Door-esque interfaces that we encounter. Each of these interactions has a cost - it reduces the quality of the user experience and can cause the user to become frustrated or exit the software.

Thankfully, these interactions can be improved through the iterative design process. I am passionate about and believe in this process and want to build rewarding, easy-to-use products.

What I’m Working On#

Since July 2021, I’ve worked at Malouf in Providence, Utah. It’s been really exciting to work on many different websites, including maloufhome.com, drozsleep.com, maloufcompanies.com, and downeasthome.com.

Some highlights for me include a store locator, a mix-and-match section, a day/night switch, blogs, along with many other product pages, category pages, banners, hero images, and resolving accessibility issues and bug fixes.

At Malouf, we use Laravel, Vue, and Gridsome (similar to Nuxt.js) for most of our sites. I am primarily a Vue developer, but I am also comfortable with Laravel. Other tools I regularly use are VS Code, Docker, Tower, Figma, Slack, MS Teams, ImageOptim, and GitHub. I am also interested in Django.

About this site#

I built this site using Hugo, which is an open-source static site generator written in Go. It’s really easy to use - you pretty much only need to know markdown unless you want to tweak the site theme. I’ve been using a theme called Codex, which I really like. My only issue with Hugo is that the templating system is a little confusing - I generally prefer Vue. For an open-source and free tool, it’s awesome.

This site is a work in progress and will contain more information about me and my projects soon. Stay tuned!

My email is chase@chase-mortensen.dev and this is a link to my current resume. If you would like to introduce yourself, please reach out - thanks! 🙌

Chase