In one month I will head off to Interaction 2010, a fantastic UX conference put together by IxDA. I was fortunate enough to go last year, and had an overwhelmingly educational and inspiring time. One of my favorite aspects, and something I am really looking forward to again this year, was simply being surrounded by so many like-minded people. It was a treat to chat, learn, and party with hundreds of UXers—whether they called themselves interaction designers, UX designers, IAs, usability professionals, or whatever else.
I think there’s something really interesting about this group of people who felt a calling to a profession that doesn’t even have an official name. For one thing, for most of us working now, there was no UX design track in school, no standard way to progress into the profession. (This is of course changing now with great new undergraduate and graduate programs starting all the time, like the ones at SVA and CIID.) For another thing, you can pretty much guarantee that everyone in this job has a strong desire to be here. Certainly none of us were pressured to continue a family legacy of UX design. Also, a career as amorphous as ours can be rather hard to find and follow, which tends to mean that only the dedicated arrive.
I was thinking about my path to UX and wondering how similar it was to others’, so I put this question out to Twitter: “What first drew you to UX design, what were you doing before, and how did you make the switch?” I got many great responses, and saw a few themes emerge.
First, we are obsessed with helping and understanding people.
Second, we love to live in the middle between art and tech. For some it was the accessibility of web development that facilitated finding a path to that middle ground, for others it was the aforementioned desire to help the humans who have to use things we design and build.
Third, many of us discovered the field (and its various names) after we were already doing the work.
I went off on my own and built a functional prototype of an app we were working on at s&p, when a UX spot opened up, they asked me to move into that role. eventually took over UX of project. but i was originally hired as a developer.
- Jonathan Knoll (@Yoni)
… I just sort of naturally started being the “UX” person on all my projects, and became more and more interested in proper UX and IxD practice. Once I started learning more about IxD I quickly realized that it was closely related to a lot of what I did in art school, and was the first time I had seen real design practice in relation to technology and “new” media. At that point I was sold, and have dedicated myself to IxD.
- Matthew Nish-Lapidus (@emenel)
The last common thread I noticed is that for many of us it feels like a calling, that there was some click of recognition, some “aha moment” when we discovered that the field was out there, or that what we were doing had a name. I love how many people used some variation of the phrase, “and the rest is history.”
I didn’t feel that I had earned the right to call myself a User Experience Designer until I saw that what I had been doing all along was. I guess I felt that research, personas, prototyping, testing was all part of being a web designer. I think that aha came when I started participating more in PhilyCHI and realized that I “am” a UX designer and I don’t want to do anything else than what I am doing.
- Lori W. Cavallucci (@lwcavallucci)
All of these themes are echoed in my story. I majored in Product Design at Stanford, which is a major that combines mechanical engineering with industrial design. I loved my major, and know that I am lucky to have gone to a school that could give both my techie and artsy sides a welcoming home. But much of the coursework was still focused on “the product” and I didn’t even realize that I was missing something until we had a lecture by some human factors specialists. I remember that lecture vividly—they spoke about their work designing the cockpits of helicopters and airport signage, and focusing not just on the “things” but on how people interact with them. It was like an epiphany to me. I was hooked.
I graduated in ‘99 when internet companies were hiring everything that moved. There were no UX designer/IA/Interaction Designer job descriptions listed then, but I knew what I wanted to do, so I got hired as a designer, developer, project manager, and created whatever path I could towards UX work. And the rest, as they say, is history.
What about you? Please feel free to share your path to UX in the comments, or find me at Interaction ‘10 and tell me your story!
A huge thanks again to everyone who contributed answers via twitter or email. I got so many great responses that I couldn’t include them all!
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post, Sarah. It’s interesting to learn how people ended up in UX. Seems like a very engaging field w/ passionate people.
Like @fredbeecher, I was a technical writer before I got into UX. I had an English degree and a bit of technical savvy.
I found that a lot of technical writing for software in the mid-90s required me to describe how to navigate through cumbersome UIs and workflows that were built by developers who didn’t have a mandate to consider any user but themselves in the design. As I wrote more and more documentation that shouldn’t have been required had there been a good design at the beginning, I found myself more interested in moving myself to the front end of the process.
I’ve never looked back.
Thanks, Heather! That definitely describes how I feel about the practice.
And thanks for sharing your story, Iain!
I drew a hotrod pixel-by-pixel in MacPaint in 1985. In that instant, my critical sense to any digital user experience was born. Then schools, then jobs.
/@uxrockabilly
Great post Sarah! It’s nice to know that so many people fell into UX or realized what they were doing anyway actually had a name (of sorts).
I originally did a graphic design qualification which briefly touched on web design (basic coding, design for web). I was lucky enough to get my first job out of school as a web designer (back in 2001) and then gradually progressed into UX. I was probably doing it for quite a few years before I learnt it had a name. Although it seems the more I learn about UX, the more I realize I don’t know!
I went to Stanford (‘99) as a CS student, loving programming. I loved programming so much that I used to have dreams about program structure being actual physical structures you could see, touch, feel, and even navigate around. I still sometimes do. But, I didn’t know CS was not just about programming. At the time all that theory in CS was just not my cup of tea, so I was disappointed and dissatisfied.
I tried a few other majors and settled on Communication because of Reeves and Nash’s HCI class and got a CS minor just so all those classes during my first year weren’t a waste of time. I took a couple of other HCI classes, but I never really “got it”.
I graduated, went to work as a web designer, worked for startups, eventually got work as a programmer and just kept programming. One day I went to work for a nanotech startup, designing their entire nanotube synthesis automation system. I was still just programming with little regard to UX beyond making stuff look nice. This job was different because my co-workers were not programmers, they were scientists and engineers who used the product for their daily life. So I worked with them and developed the UI component using their input and feedback. I worked very closely with them so that the way the software behaved, not just the visual part, fit with their workflow and with the way all their other tools worked.
One day we went to install one of these systems at a university physics department. I was there to “train” the people in how to use it. The system took no more than 5-10 minutes to learn, but would save hours of manual monitoring and work. When I was done with the demo, the look on their faces was an expression of joy and relief. That was my “aha!” moment.
Since then my goal has been to work in UX while still “keeping my hands dirty” with development.
As a kid, I made things for me, my family, and my friends to play with, on, or in: airplanes, castles, plays, comic books, and games (board games, role-playing games, and computer games). For college I went to art school (Cooper Union, ‘94) and studied conceptual art, sculpture, and installation art, and built several awesome computer-controlled interactive sculptures in the very early 1990s. This interest got me a job, nearly right out of school, managing and soon designing CD-ROM computer games. As a game designer, I was making wireframes and flowcharts every day, collaborating with — but effectively leading — visual designers, animators, writers, and technologists. My jobs and projects eventually evolved from games to web sites, and now I run an interaction design firm.
As far as I’m concerned, I’ve been doing the same thing for almost my whole life: designing and building experiences.