A Career Change at 37, Are You Crazy?
My unconventional 15-year preparation to become a UX Designer — selling custom engagement rings
In this article I illustrate how my 15-year career in selling and designing over 1,000 custom engagement rings has prepared me for UX Design. And how my bespoke, user-centered sales process mirrors what a UX Designer does everyday.
About Me
My name is Tim Hansen. I am a User Experience Designer based in Salt Lake City, UT. I am married and have 3 amazing kiddos (9, 6, and 3). I spent 15 years in luxury retail sales and sales management working for 2 companies: O.C. Tanner and S.E. Needham Jewelers. I sold custom diamond engagement rings and fine timepieces such as Rolex, Omega, Breitling, Patek Philippe, etc…
I am also a photographer, specializing in brand and product photography. Click here to see my photography website.
I spent years doing UX Design before I knew it was a career. In 2015 I decided to change the narrative of my life and transition into UX Design as my full time job. I enrolled in a 12-week intensive boot camp at DevMountain in Provo, UT specifically for UX/UI Design. It was the finest, most comprehensive education I’ve ever received. We were only 8 students so we were able to receive a lot of personal mentoring from the 7 instructors. I learned and implemented UX principles that our instructors brought us from their companies, such as Jive Communications and Instructure.
You can view my portfolio here. You can view my resume here.
Bespoke Salesmanship Matters
As I pour over the job requirements for a UX Designer I see companies wanting 3–5 years of experience. I think to myself… “What am I!?!” Am I a junior level designer? Or am I a valuable candidate with the ability to parlay my 15 years of experience into it’s UX equivalent. Does my experience matter? Or am I starting from scratch? Well, let me explain my experience and you make the call.
Let me set the scene — Utah is the wedding capital of the world. A lot of people getting married, especially young people. Within an hour’s drive from Salt Lake City a customer can visit over 100 jewelry stores that sell engagement rings. I worked at O.C. Tanner Jewelers, regarded as one of the finest jewelers in the country.
Competitive Landscape — A couple walks into a bar… I mean a jewelry store. The customer comes in, you exchange greetings and introduce yourself. You sit down and get to know each other. This lovely couple has shopped at least 5–10 jewelry stores and heard every salesperson’s schpeel. The confusing competitive landscape for them is maddening at this point. Which store should I buy from and why? In comes my style…. empathy.
Empathy — Empathy, not salesmanship. That’s it… empathy. My internal motivation and methodology in life has always been empathy. Putting myself in their shoes. Listening so intently and genuinely that the client feels heard… feels understood. No-strings-attached-listening. There’s a reason God gave me two ears and one mouth. Empathy is a great start to a thoughtful user experience.
Education and Honest Answers — My goal was to educate people, to be helpful, thoughtful, to answer sincere questions, to offer vision and wisdom. Am I a naturally gifted designer? Maybe. But mostly I have empathy, follow a process, and know how to utilize and trust my team of engineers and goldsmiths.
My 11-Step User-Centered Design Process
- Core Idea Session
Hopes and dreams. Brainstorming. Conceptualization. Information gathering. Every couple has a unique relationship and a unique way they approach how they want their ring made. This could be a hand sketch or a picture from Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook. It’s something the bride has in her head she has wanted her whole life. Sometimes clients cannot express in words what they think the ring should look like. So I’ll hand my clients a pen and paper and have them draw what they’re trying to describe.
I ask very distinct and detailed questions in order to know things for certain. My clients might think some of my questions are unusual, but from experience I can foresee potential issues that should be looked at now. The ultimate purpose of these moments is to honestly and candidly understand what they want the ring to look and feel like.
2. Distilling Information, Teaching, Educating
The diamond / jewelry industry has it’s own set of vernacular, a lot of words customers have never heard before. My goal is to transform any confusing information into easy-to-understand phrases and concepts. To make the scary become not scary. The impossible to become possible. And to ultimately gain the client’s trust so they truly believe I can build exactly what they envision. I want their hard-earned money to be well invested.
3. Establishing Requirements
The purpose of this process is to define the client’s requirements (the must have’s and the must have not’s). For example, maybe the bride works in the medical industry and she needs the diamond to sit very low in the setting. I would use specific tools such as millimeter calipers to make specific measurements as to the width and thickness of the ring. We talk form vs function, beauty vs practicality, look vs lifestyle, etc… We establish a budget and a timeframe for completion.
4. Low Fidelity Sketch
Low-fidelity sketches, in particular, are rough representations of concepts that help us to validate those concepts early on in the ring design process.
Designer Paul Rand once said, “An understanding of man’s intrinsic needs, and of the necessity to search for a climate in which those needs could be realized, is fundamental to the education of the designer. Prototyping helps us to unveil and explore these human needs, opening the door to insightful interaction and more empathetic design solutions. Low-fidelity prototyping helps us to find the middle ground between overspending and overthinking, between too little investment and too much user validation. By building a practical, preliminary version of your product, you will catch potential problems and promising insights faster and earlier in the process.”
5. Teamwork: Design and Development
Now that we have a great idea of what the client wants, it’s time to build it! It takes cohesive teamwork to construct a custom ring. Each individual’s talents and experiences are utilized in order for the project to succeed. Synergy. Let me introduce you to the each contributor of the team:
6. CAD — Computer Aided Design
Now it’s time for a gifted engineer to sit down and build the framework of the ring and make the concepts gathered in your vision meeting come to life. The engineer will use all the information gathered in the brainstorming sessions, study the sketches, and then build the framework, the style, the curves, and housing / prong-work for each diamond. He will use extreme zooming techniques to ensure exactness to 1/100th of a millimeter.
7. Rendered Images
Finally, the designer will make several real-life images for the client to review. These images will help the client envision what the ring will look like when it is complete.
8. Prototyping
Along with real-life images, it’s imperative to give the client a tactile experience. With the use of a 3D printer, our engineer would create a 3D prototype for the client to review. Yes, an actual, legitimate model for the client to touch, feel, and try on. This prototype is the exact shape, width, and size as the real ring will become. The prototype fulfills two purposes: One, to show the client exactly what the ring will look like. Two, this prototype will actually become the ring. I’ll explain this further in casting.
9. Client Feedback Meeting (User Testing)
Now the client gets to come in and see the progress, to review the images, and assess the prototype. In this meeting I am looking for continual validation. I want my clients to be a part of this journey and see their vision every step of the way. On average, 95% of the time the client will approve the ring to be cast and finished. 5% of the time we need to make some slight changes. In these instances, we implement the changes and the clients will come back to give their blessing on the final mockups.
10. Casting and Finishing
The prototype is now ready for casting. The goldsmiths use their magical skills and turn this piece of wax into the real ring. They make a rubber mold and investment, the mold is placed in a kiln and cast into metal. To summarize an seriously technical process in a few words: the space that the wax occupies becomes metal. Then comes hours of hand-finishing and gem-setting to bring a rough piece of metal into the beautiful finished ring.
11. Final Client Presentation
This is like Christmas morning for me. I have done this over 1,000 times during the last 15 years and every time I felt like a dad showing off his newborn baby. I find sincere enjoyment in watching the client get to see the ring for the first time… to share a moment of seeing their project come to life.
To Sum Up
I have a passion for building things. I have learned you must use the best materials, the best people, and absolutely no short-cuts. I love design because it is an awesome quasi scientific process, a beautiful hybrid of science and art. Because I care so deeply about how a customer interacts with something, craftsmanship and carefully thought out details are important to me.
I have a passion for beautiful holistic collaboration. I believe that communication skills and creative problems solving skills have helped me throughout my career. I have sincerely enjoyed seeing my clients years down the road still enjoying the ring I helped them design. I remember their names, they remember mine. It is extremely satisfying. I kind of feel like I have been a part of their relationship since the very beginning, and that we will always share that bond.
As I leave the career of selling engagement rings behind me, it will never be forgotten. Each skill of process, instinct, and human interaction will be transferred into it’s UX equivalent. I will draw on this experience to solve UX problems. Every UX project I engage in will be influenced by the design process I fostered while designing engagement rings. Selling exists in every career. Empathy is something I have deep down inside me. As I transition into my career as a UX Designer, I know I’m not starting from scratch. The company that hires me is not getting a 22-year-old recent graduate with no real life experience. They are getting a smart, creative, business savvy designer whose career experience does matter.
Thank you for reading! To see my UX Design portfolio, visit timhansen.info.
