It all has to start somewhere

For me it began with the flippant decision to switch my major from mechanical engineering to psychology. The engineering classes were hard and took up way too much time. As a freshman only 3 months into my college career I wanted, no I needed, more time to party. Psychology seemed like a good switch of pace. I always liked helping people, and more importantly the classes seemed easy… I didn’t even begin to fathom the ways in which this decision, based on the most ridiculous of reasons, would alter the course of my life.

I didn’t become obsessed with Psychology right away; most of the intro courses were excruciatingly large, and I was too enthralled in my new independence to attend many of them anyway. Slowly, my binge studying of the material lead to a real interest in understanding how people think. Delving into higher level courses allowed me to start conducting some real studies. I came to realize how frivolous most assumptions about people are. There is no absolute truth when it comes to the mysteries of the human mind, and in order to get close one needs data; glorious, beautiful data. To prove or disprove a hypothesis became a passion of mine. It wouldn’t matter if my hypothesis was right or wrong, because either way a small piece of the massive puzzle that is the brain became a little bit clearer.

Let’s skip ahead a couple of years to when I was starting my third company. The two before it were essentially insignificant. I had handled the digital marketing of a hip-hop artist hailing from the same college. This was relatively productive for a couple of years, but our three man “company” disbanded once we all graduated. The second LLC involved the production of modular DJ equipment. I thought it to be a brilliant idea, but the barrier to entry for a new manufacturing company turned out to be close to insurmountable. So that lead me to company number three.

We started off with a strong team of developers, a CEO with a brilliant idea for a social media app, and me as the director of marketing. Throttled by a CEO that wanted to keep the idea a secret for as long as possible I had little to do as far as conventional marketing goes. I started helping out with the design and front-end development of the app. Our developers were very back-end heavy, and so I took up the slack in the looks and architecture of the design. Another seemingly inconsequential decision that would change my world.

I loved designing the app. I immediately dove into research on things like what colors to use to accentuate action items, conventional layouts of settings pages, the best navigation layouts, what a conversion funnel is and how to optimize it with design tweaks, and so on. My passion for design continued to grow, but something was bugging me. I kept presenting my designs to the team, and maybe half the team would like a page layout one way while the other half wanted it the other way. We would eventually come to an agreement and move forward, but my training in psychology kept me skeptical. Proving anything in my psych classes required as large a participant pool as possible. How could the team, a group of only seven people, possibly represent the mass of users that we wanted this app to reach? This is around the time that my two passions collided; hypothesis testing and design.

I came across user centered UX design and lean ideologies and it confirmed my beliefs. I realized how huge of a mistake it was that we were not testing our app with any users until we got it “perfect.” We had spent endless hours debating whether or not to implement certain features, and we had no idea which of these features users actually wanted. I became an advocate for testing all of our designs by interviewing users and conducting A/B tests. Sadly, before I could get too deep into user centered design our team fell apart due to lack of funds and a difference of ideologies within the company.

The UXDI immersive course at General Assembly seemed like the logical next step. With a passion for UX design but no substantial experience in the field, I felt that the course was the most efficient way to break into UX.