How design and psychology has infiltrated every aspect of my life: from coffee to computer, to people

I don’t have an original start to this story. Covid hit.

courtesy of unsplash, and slightly triggering flashbacks

I, like everyone else under quarantine during the beginning of 2020, was at a loss. I had recently moved back to my quaint hometown from Columbus, Ohio (an overstatement, my hometown is a home village, accommodating a total of 156, according to the 2019 census report)

I knew that this couldn’t last. As it hadn’t before, once, twice, … it continues.

Before my most recent stay in Columbus (a little over a year), I had given a go to various other locations — Chicago (my favorite), Las Vegas (my least favorite), and numerous other scattered cities in Ohio. All succumbing to ultimate failure due to my financial shortcomings (and perhaps, behavior, but we’ll save that for a different article. Happy ending promised!)

I’d been a barista off and on for over 8 years. It was my first job (essentially) and my last job, prior to Covid. Spanning from my early adolescence into my late twenties. There were jobs in between of different sorts, but being a barista became intertwined with my identity, no matter the city.

Me, pretending I’m content with this identity and being recognized everywhere, smiling politely to my regulars (who I really do love) :-)

“Hey, you’re that girl from, — insert most relevant coffee shop here”

“That’s it, That’s me!” — See photo to the left to get an accurate representation of my feelings.

I feared that this was it, this was the culmination of my highest achievements. The friendly coffee shop girl, no matter compact-sized city or large.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved coffee. I loved people. I am forever grateful for the family and lifelong network of friends and acquaintances that I have acquired from these numerous jobs. Truly. It defined me.

I love psychology. I love narrative stories. I love designing the human experience. I like being a coffee bar psychologist. I like the creativity of curating a unique coffee beverage. These have been pivotal themes throughout my life. Short-lived stints in college, with the goal to pursue psychology — psychology, writing, and art, always, always my guiding areas of interest in life, and how I’ve defined my character. Psychology, art, empathy, creativity, human behavior, words. Always. It always came back to these.

I digress. (Can you tell I love writing?)

I loved the coffee shop environment but I’ve loved it for how many years now? A little too many. It was getting old. It sustained me for long enough, but quickly, it didn’t. (Maybe not quick enough. I knew how to stretch a budget.) I’d be thirty in three years and I imagined myself, 71 years old (I have a penchant for drama) hunched over the coffee shop bar, struggling to reach the espresso machine because I’m 5'1" and apparently every woman in my family shrinks three inches as they age, barely being able to afford rent still, let alone owning a house. This was not going to fly.

When I found myself isolated back in my mother's house in my village separated from all facets of city life, I stared at my newly adopted cat that was dropped off during Covid, and I said, “Promise, what are we going to do? We can’t live like this.” (Sidenote: I want to check my privilege here and point out how incredibly lucky I am that I HAD a family to come back to amongst all of Covid.)

Promise being embarrassed by me, he does not think I’m funny

Yes. My cat changed my life. (there’s another article in there, too.)

At the time, romance dwindling, social circle small, I named my cat Promise because I promised him I would make a better life for us. I’m cheesy, I know, but every time I look at him and hear his name, it’s a constant reminder.

Enter the transition

One day, I was sitting at a coffee shop (haha) with my Mother (no, I never worked at this one), and little did I know that we were about to have a (hopefully, — I’ll keep you updated), life-changing conversation.

I am so thankful for my Mother and her ceaseless patience and belief in me. She’s been through the wringer with me. I was rambling as I do about what the f@*k was I going to do with my life, Mom? I needed something NOW, but I needed something that was going to last. I didn’t want something short-term. I didn’t want something easy. I wanted something I could be proud of.

I didn’t want to have to come back home again because I didn’t have a choice. I wanted to leave rationally, and intentionally, with purpose and a future. For once. I wanted to rely on ME for the first time in my life. Being recently sober, I was ready to change my life.

I went through a manic spiral (I promise I, unfortunately, have what is needed to claim that term) into researching trade jobs, vocational schools, anything and everything that didn’t quite necessitate a four to an eight-year college degree, been there, tried that. Life gets in the way.

I contemplated being an electrician, a plumber, working at a mortuary, a cat behaviorist (I still dream of this). The thought of me arriving in my high heels, fake nails, and a bow in my hair to fix someone’s sink, well, my social circle made quite a few jokes about it. I knew it wasn’t realistic, and where was the passion? I didn’t want to settle. I wanted to be excited about my future. Caring about my profession emotionally has always been huge for me, far exceeds my monetary expectations or needs. Passion is first.

My mom said, “Sarah, whatever happened to that thing you were so into when you were growing up? You used to read those Something something for Dummies when you were editing layouts for your friends on Myspace? You were so into that for a while. Why’d you stop?”

One of these old things

“CSS/HTML, coding, etc?” I laughed. “Yeah, I loved it. But that’s not realistic. That’s for smart people, logical people, mathematically geared people. That’s not me.”

She said, “Are you sure? Have you ever looked into it? Why don’t you just take a gander, just for fun? What could it possibly hurt?”

I did not want to be an electrician. I have a LOT of respect for electricians and all trade jobs. My biological father is an iron welder. I did not think that I had what it took, nor the enthusiasm.

I decided to say hello to Google, and Reddit, my old friends (and vices.)

I lose a lot of time to research. It consumes me.

I ended up in a catastrophic hole of probably 45 tabs opened upon discovering the numerous web dev subreddits that existed, the how-to become a self-taught web dev (SELF-TAUGHT, — WHAT?!?!), I googled specifically, “do you need to be good at math to become a web developer”, .. it goes on, and on and on. I probably didn’t even know the term ‘web developer’ before these searches.

I was in awe. I had an ex who I always viewed as some sort of god of intellect, he was my first real partner and he was a computer scientist. It never even entered my headcanon.

Needless to say, I was hooked. I mean for weeks, maybe months of research. I was sold. So many avenues! So many options! I knew it was not going to be an easy road. I was aware of this, regardless, I was doing a lot more thinking than doing.

Somewhere, later down the road, I came across the word(s), “bootcamps.” (I know, I hear the audience laugh track.) I tried out a few. My favorite prior to what I landed on was The Odin Project. I quickly realized that with where I was at currently in life, I needed structure, and as Google and Facebook do, they were listening.

Real-life image of Google and Facebook’s ad services

Enter: Lambda School

The ads start popping up. Free until you find a job making $50k or more? No up-front pay? Full-stack web development course? Part-time? Is this real?

I heard all of the discourse. I read every article, every Reddit feud, eyed the founders twitter compulsively, still, I was sold.

For someone in my position, I’ve always been poor. I have never seen an annual income over $12k. This was what I needed. It spoke to me.

I still wondered with my creative, “right-brain” mind, could I do this? There was a trial period, I thought, “Why not?” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Initially, upon enrolling in Lambda, I was set on the iOs track, they dropped it. My second choice was UI/UX, they dropped it. I was left with web development. It is probably not in your best interest to enter a field in which your thoughts are, “I was left with..” (Regardless, I do not regret it. At all.)

I read the ISA (income-sharing agreement) from front to back. I got stuck in tutorial hell/purgatory. I read myself to death.

I convinced myself that I could make this creative, that I could fall in love with the code, that I could bring psychology into it. (And I know you can, truthfully, there is art in code.) I did fall in love with some of it. I liked problem-solving. The serotonin release when I finally fixed a bug that no one else could, remarkable, better than any drug. I loved loved loved seeing an empty console.log

I was exhilarated when during my 3rd build week the Redux lightbulb finally went off, and I was able to figure out a problem (after working on it for hours) that nobody else could. I fell in love with React.js a little, prior to that.

But none of this compares to while in the first two units, I was in LOVE. I dreamt about it. I stayed up for 24 hours more days than I would like to admit. (Re: mania)

I woke up to fix a bug that I had discovered the solution to in my sleep.
Of course, the first two months were the trial. The first two months were heavily design/html/css/introduction to JavaScript-based. We hadn’t got into the nitty-gritty yet, by far.

I spent hours tweaking my silly, little portfolio design once deployed. I moved each pixel by a half decimal. I tried a billion different color combinations. I loved CSS. When finally figuring out how to deploy it, I forced my family and friends to open it in the browser and on mobile as I hovered over them watching them interact with it, watching to see where their natural instincts took them. Like a hawk, seeing if I was satisfied. Rarely was I. This happened in nearly every project. I could work on it for hours. I was bitter when they took it away and I had to move on.

Coding my portfolio

As Lamba progressed and I begrudgingly made it through the initial Javascript course, and we moved on to React.JS and Redux, I struggled. I took the React.JS unit twice because I wanted to really solidify it. I don’t do anything half-assed in regards to education. Additionally, throughout the Build Weeks (a collaborative project between developers at different points in the program, and in varying tracks (data science, front end, back end, design leads, etc) I always tried to land myself in the front end position and I was often scolded for paying too much attention to the design and user flow, and “big picture” versus functionality, and one thing at a time. My analytical peers did NOT care about how this color scheme or setup conflicted with the previous page, or how this was going to conflict and implode later. I was obsessed with accessibility, when this topic was introduced to me I was more excited than I had been in months. I was obsessed with longevity.

My favorite part of every project was the end. I don’t mean that in the — it’s-over-we’re-finally-done way. I mean it in the this-was-the-time-where-I-had-all-of-the-freedom-in-the-world-without-anybody’s-dismay way to tweak the layout, to analyze people using it, to see if the interactions made sense, if they were natural with the human instinct to progress, if my color-blind friend could see the colors or make sense of the buttons, if my 73-year-old mother could navigate the website — if it came intuitively, if they left the website in frustration. Are we following ARIA guidelines?

I wish that we had taken all of these things into consideration from the beginning, initially. I had wished that a mobile-first approach was more often prioritized and utilized. (So much messy code later, unnecessary.) I wished that we, as the developers, took the time to talk about all of this from the get-go.

Regardless, I’m fast-forwarding. Maybe my whole Lambda experience from beginning to end will pour out of me another time in a separate article/stream of consciousness monologue that nobody has asked for.

When I say fast-forwarding, I mean, we are really fast-forwarding. We are not even going to address the tumultuous descent I faced when tackling the back-end portion of the program.

The last part of Lambda is the ominous “Labs.” It is the final “Sprint” or Unit of Lambda. Yes, I made it this far. You hear about it your entire time throughout the curriculum, you look at the Unit 5'ers as some small gods. Luminous deities. You can never imagine being where they are. You are sure that you never will be. You shoot up imposter syndrome like a drug.

It makes your skin coil, but under that, there is excitement, and intrigue/mystique.

Lambda Labs

Lamba Labs (for part-time) is a two-month Sprint, sort of like a giant Build Week, but instead of two weeks. It’s two months of extreme, intensive collaboration between allll different tracks of the program, except you’re all at the same point in the program — — the end.

You are randomly assigned with a multitude of other engineers in the program and are assigned a role on a real-world app that could be potentially used by hundreds of users daily out in the actual world, and you are working with real stakeholders — versus the solo and team projects that we’ve done in the past. You fill out a form so they can analyze where they think you might be the best fit. You work with real stakeholders who are invested in the outcome of their projects. You pick up off of previous iterations of the product from the last Labs cohort. The entire unit is structured like a real in-the-field experience.

You have weekly standup meetings with the Stakeholders where you can present your progress and present any questions/”blockers” that you may have. You meet with your individual feature team every other night. You document all of your progress using tickets in an organized Trello file that your Project Managers are free to look at at any time. You make sure your Github stays green, and you're following the Notion guidelines and rubric. You stay in contact regularly through Zoom and Slack.

In the beginning, as I mentioned you have the ability to fill out a form to assign you to the position that is best suited to you for your team.

I anxiously anticipated the link being posted in my Slack cohort’s channel. I was ready to pounce. I knew where I needed to be and where I didn’t.

I perused the various roles that were available, “Back End Dev, Technical Project Lead, Machine Learning, iOs Engineer, Front End Dev (surely this is where I need to be, I was ready) but then .. What’s this? …….. Design Lead.”

Unbelievable. I answered all of the questions honestly. We quickly retrieved our results (ok, it felt like a lifetime to me) and I GOT IT! DESIGN LEAD. Whatever that meant.

After our introduction to the stakeholder and general introduction to the project, it was amazing. An application that was designed to use screen time to minimize screen time, and it was about writing and reading! I was hooked — and terrified. More fire was added to the ignition though.

I created a channel with four other students who were assigned to be design leads. I took the initiative to reach out and I quickly realized that I was the only person who was enthused about being a “Design Lead.” After getting further clarification on what it meant, there was a lot of hearsay of, “I’m a coder, not a designer. I’m here to code, not to make things look pretty.” Etc, etc.

However, I was enthused. There was a brief time where they tried to take me off of my position and move me to a back-end role, for once in my very submissive led life, I put my foot down. (Lambda really pushed me to grow infinitely.) “I will do anything you want me to do, but I am keeping this role.”

This was wild for me, I knew there was something here for me to be motivated that strongly to hold my ground. That’s not to say that I wasn’t terrified because I had absolutely no experience in this role. It was completely out of my comfort zone. I knew it only existed because they had previously dropped the UI/UX track so they needed to fill the gaps. I had done my research. But I was willing to tackle the challenge. I was passionate when it came to working, and this felt like work. I did not want to let the stakeholders down or my teammates, or myself. I was so close to the finish line.

I knew what I needed to do. After reading the role description, I knew that it entailed a lot more than, “Making things look pretty.”

We had the honor to work with a UI/UX vet who had 10+ years in the industry. For the first time since those first two months which felt like so, so long ago (over a year) I was in awe. I was obsessed. I clung to every detail that was shared with us. I asked too many questions. He told me “these questions were out of the scope of this project, I like that you’re thinking this far ahead, and deeply, but you will probably never have to worry about any of these use cases in the real world as a developer.”

I felt my stomach drop. I think I wanted to have to worry about all of these use cases in the real world.. as a .. developer. As a developer?

This wasn’t the first time that I had let the world of User Experience and User Interface sneak its claws into my brain. It had piqued my interest in the past but I had tried to stifle it. I was already so far into this program, further than I ever thought that I could be, it wasn’t time for my mind to be traveling.

I reached out to the instructor in question and I said, “hey, I know you may not have the time to answer this, but if I were to ask you if investing the past year and a half of my life to be a front end developer only to completely switch direction into UI or UX, would you say I’ve wasted my time? Is it a complete switch of direction? LOL”

He told me point-blank that UI/UX was not an easy field to break into especially with no previous experience or design background, but that if I were serious my skills as a developer, in the long run, could only help me flourish, that the disconnect between Designers and Developers and their ability to communicate was a highly sought after skillset to dissolve that bridge.

I felt excited again. But that I had to put the work in, and that it was going to be a lot of work. To keep doing what I was doing with coding, seek out those experiences and network and maybe something could come out of that, in whatever role you’re in when you’re ready.

I am in my final week of Labs and it has been remarkable. I have loved every second of diving into a completely foreign tool to me — Figma, I fell in love with Whimsical units ago, but only got a brief introduction. I got a taste of wireframes, low and high-fidelity mockups, user stories, user flows, and prototyping was my favorite. I was grateful that in creating my mockups, I knew what it took to achieve them on the other end. (Coding.)

Live prototype demo

I spent hours, and hours, and hours. I created an entire high-fidelity mockup for a feature that I didn’t know already existed in a Figma that was not given to me. I did not care. I loved the experience. I learned so much and wanted to learn more, more, more. (And I’m very excited to be aware that I haven’t even touched the tip of the tip of the iceberg with Figma, or any of the other design tools at my disposal.)

Our team suffered some hurdles with lacking insights from the higher-ups and the scope of our feature changing on more than one experience, navigating the new world of ideation and constant revisions, I figure this is a good representation of the workplace so I embraced it. I made the necessary adjustments, listened to my team, regular check-ins and standups, walkthroughs, and proceeded forward, anticipating the MVP for the Sprints to be revised and re-imagined at any moment as the product is still being defined prior to launch. Earlier on, after investing a hefty amount of time into ideating, my entire feature was changed to a different one so patience was learned, understood, and embraced. (From Meet the Author to Single Player Mode.) It’s all extra XP for the industry. I took it in stride.

Nonetheless, I loved envisioning the progression of Scribble Stadium, formerly Story Squad from beginning to end, and knew all of the challenges were only preparing me for the real-world workforce. The overall concept is to get kids to read more, back to the roots of creativity that existed before the digital takeover and get those brain muscles working, and have fun doing it! So yes, use a screen to remove yourself from the screen. It’s extremely innovative and the passion behind the founders is remarkable and invigorating. You want to make them happy. (Shoutout to Graig Peterson and Darwin Johnson!)

The edutainment application is set up using a multiplayer gameplay mode where you begin by reading a chapter of a selected story and then drawing an excerpt from your favorite passage of choice (and by drawing, we mean colored pencils, paper) and snapping a picture, and uploading that drawing, and then writing a side-quest (and yes, we mean WRITING, pencil, and paper) the same thing. After this, you are placed on a team with anonymous other children (no pictures, no names to take away the pressure of the popularity contests of the internet, and due to child privacy laws) and you vote on your favorite stories/drawings until the final battle and the sequence repeats. This was the initial setup of Story Squad.

(Along with a very long list of other really cool features for parents like analyzing the progression of their childrens actual handwriting and grammatical accuracy, etc.)

Our goal, for my team with our feature, was a massive undertaking. We were to design and implement Single Player Mode for children.

For the children like me, who may be a little shyer, or like to read a little quicker, at their own pace. We were to design a completely different gameplay mode from beginning to end with some guidance on the pivotal concepts already outlaid for Single Player Mode from the stakeholders. We needed to ensure that the Single Player Mode in terms of design and functionality didn’t differ too significantly from multi-player mode so as to keep everything concurrent, and to keep the children just as invested as they may be with the competition aspect of Multiplayer.

There were a lot of variables to take in and differences that we didn’t initially realize were as big as they were. Accomodating for bots instead of real players, multiplayer mode being trophy based vs single player mode, etc and what that might look like.

I had a lot of fear going into it because initially there was no wireframe present for Single Player Mode so I had to wing it with my impression of what the stakeholders were asking for until our next meeting.

An example of our Team Trello board for collaboration

I got to work hands-on with the developers, product managers and design team creating tickets for my backlog to see what they needed prioritized first.

I was afraid that my position would be mocked or that I would feel useless to them (the developers) but the Lead Front End engineer waited on my designs to proceed forward, we worked together sharing input and ideas and he told me that he had absolutely no design intuition and that this saved him a remarkable amount of time to just be able to dig in and start coding/creating what was given to him. I learned how principle preparation and collaboration are in the building of and delivering software that goes out to hundreds of users, how there is an infinite number of moving parts, and you will hit setbacks and you’ll just reroute, but it’s all possible. It’s always possible.

Chunk of a feature of a component to share with front end dev

I was in awe at the ability to create a design and to directly share the CSS with my developers from Figma. I got a small taste of the massive powerhouse that Figma is in the ability to prototype and see live demos of the interactions between all different components of your design, of the ability to display state in buttons, in actions. I learned about the principles of design and the micro-interactions and placement of a button and contrasting fonts that I never would have thought about previously.

I got to watch the reactions of the stakeholder's faces as they watched a demo of my prototype. I got to watch a feature become fully fleshed out from beginning to end and come to life, and be a part of almost all phases of the delivery process.

It was exhilarating.

One iteration of my first mockup/introduction to Figma, (color palette/font not my own choices lol)

I got to learn how it is to work with an already dictated color palette, design system. I was used to engineering my own projects from scratch so I had to adjust to holding back my own biases, and going off of what was already given with my own tweaks and input.

I think that with the amazing work our small team of four developers put in, the next cohort will have an amazing place to launch off of our investment. It was amazing to watch my mockup come to life and how quickly it got things rolling. We went from a completely blank canvas to a live deployment of our code including all of the required components, including styling, with some modifications needed down the line upon further database updating.

The future cohorts will have to work on further implementation of the bots and a larger book database but otherwise, I think they have a great start! We started with nothing.

Needless to say, I am waiting to hear back from Coursera on the Google Certificate for UI/UX and in the meantime I am cycling through the retired Lambda UI/UX videos and coursework. I know that this is only the beginning of my journey. I truly do believe that I have finally found what I am looking for, and I do not believe that my time at Lambda was wasted. It was just a starter, like a wine tasting. I’ve found my blend and it’s exciting to know that I now know where I want my focus to be — UI/UX and upon gaining that knowledge I have everything in my toolhouse to bring my ideas to life with code.

Now, the title of this narrative piece was, “How design and psychology has infiltrated every aspect of my life: from coffee to computer, to people”

I have done little to address this.

I feel that I’ve found my home. I still need to narrow down where I hope to focus in the long run, it’s all so enticing. Am I more interested in the research aspect of User Experience, or User Interface & Design? Do I have a focus? I don’t think I’ll know until I know, but — — Writing has been my #1 passion for the entirety of my life, my own way of defining myself, before and after coffee. Writing is psychology. Writing is art, creativity. People are psychology. A coffee shop is psychology. Maybe I am using the term “Design” too loosely. But designing narratives, designing the experience when a customer walks into a coffee shop. How do I make them feel most welcome? How do I best meet their request via coffee? How do they leave happy? How do I leave a lasting impression? How do I present this item of the month in the most visually appealing way without seeming abrasive? What is this human's first impression when we meet? When they walk in? How do I make them come back?

I did not realize how transferable these skills were. I did not realize that THESE were the guiding facets of what kept me going for so long with coffee. I did not realize that these were the underlying motifs that inspired me in any career. It’s what I needed. I just needed more. I needed more of it.

And then I found UI/UX. When I was first introduced to it, the very first words that I saw (probably a visual bias) were Empathy, Psychology, and Creativity.

My future was set. Making people happier. Having a lasting effect on a human being. Working with developers. Creating user stories. Analyzing human behavior. Morphing art into all of it. Not having to feel guilty for spending hours researching, and then being expected to write about it (the dream!) There’s a long way to go until I “build” my design home so to say, but we have lift-off. The same questions I find myself asking above in relation to coffee, are directly transferable to the entire Designer experience.

To say the least, I can’t wait. Thank you Lambda for being my guiding light. Thank you Lambda Labs. Thank you, Mom. Thank you Promise, the cat.

We’ve got a long way to go.