My UX Journey, Vol 07: Meet Mick Champayne
In this series, we highlight the career journey of a Hexagon chapter lead. Experience Designer and Chicago chapter co-lead Mick Champayne encourages emerging designers to connect with one another, and look beyond UX for unexpected inspiration.
Mick Champayne works as a Lead Experience Designer at Digitas, an agency in Chicago. She says her fondest Hexagon memory has been a workshop around designing for social change, which her chapter put organized during Chicago’s design week. “We partnered with a local chapter of the nonprofit Adopteen — a group dedicated to creating a special community for adoptees — to teach design thinking methodology in an effort to help solve some real-world problems,” she recalls.
Q: How did you get started in the User Experience space?
Oh boy, it has been a journey. “Back in my day, we didn’t even have a name for UX!” – just kidding. I’ve been in the industry for 10–11 years now, and I got my start by studying Interactive Arts & Media at a private arts school (Columbia College Chicago). I’m pretty sure I picked my major because I wanted to make websites – hey, I loved the internet. Especially designing AOL profiles and Geocities pages. I focused mostly on visual design and some light coding, and I remember there only being one UX class offered.
Most of my skills have been learned on the job, or lots of Googling (no shame). I started my career as an intern at the Digitas London office. I ended up staying there for a couple of years working as a designer on lots of digital campaigns and web builds, which exposed me to more UX-focused practices like user research and usability testing.
Fast forward a couple years, and I found myself at Critical Mass (CM), an experience design agency. My tenure at CM really helped me appreciate the importance of always considering the user and developing empathy for them. Plus I learned a whole new way of working. I traded in Photoshop for Sketch and Invision, and I was put on a project supporting an in-house team, so I was thrown into product design and agile methodology (“Google, what’s a scrum and who is its master?”).
And finally, I somehow managed to boomerang back to Digitas (“I wish I knew how to quit you.”). This time around had been exciting as I’ve been on projects helping define future visions for digital experiences, considering all touchpoints of a user journey, which has been a lot of exercising my strategy muscles 💪
All this to say that UX is a field where you are constantly learning, which I find exciting and fulfilling.
Q: What’s a typical day like for you?
I’m a bit atypical – I get up at the buttcrack of dawn, go for a run or the gym, and do a couple of hours of personal work (I love to illustrate on the side) before I bike downtown. Sometimes I’m grabbing a coffee with young designers or my mentees, otherwise I head into the office. At work, I’m currently helping lead a big redesign, so my days lately have been filled with helping set the vision, working with junior designers and providing feedback, and getting that client deck looking FIERCE. After I clock out, if I don’t have an event or catch-up with friends, I make a beeline for my couch (where I’m probably doodling or binge watching Netflix).
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve gotten about working in UX?
Don’t be afraid to ask questions or speak up – which is hard being a minority in this field. You’re probably already feeling uncomfortable as potentially the only person like you (a woman, a person of color, or some other slice of intersectionality) in the room, so I totally understand not wanting to draw more attention or upset the status quo. It’s something I’m constantly practicing, to put myself outside of my comfort level.
Your voice can have such a great impact because we need new perspectives!
A great example of this is Twitter. I was reading Mike Monteiro’s Ruined By Design, and he goes on about how it’s become this breeding ground for trolls. Now they’re faced with trying to band-aid the platform to deal with harassment, death threats, doxxing, and all kinds of abuse – because Twitter was never built in a way to deal with all of that.
None of the people designing it had ever had been harassed or abused, and therefore didn’t take it into consideration. If there had been diverse voices in the room, instead of all white dudes, they would have designed for more than just one person’s experience.
Q: What’s something you wish you had been told when you started your career?
The importance of networking. I think a lot of us were brought up on this idea of meritocracy – that we would be rewarded and recognized for all the good work we do. And while that can be the case, it took me a long time to learn how invaluable having conversations and building your community can be.
In the past year, I’ve said yes to so many more coffees and meetups, even if there was no “goal” in mind. In fact, it’s how I met my co-lead Jillian, and how we got our Hexagon ball rolling. We met at a General Assembly event and found out we were two super passionate women who want to keep fostering community and conversation.
Q: What keeps you motivated?
The future. Is that cliché? I believe there are lots of different possible futures out there, and I like exploring and going through the exercise of how that could potentially play out. It’s applicable to my own personal life as well as the work I do for clients.
When it comes to my illustration work though, I’m mostly motivated by what makes me laugh. Gotta balance all the seriousness out!
Q: What gives you professional inspiration?
On a day-to-day basis, I follow a lot of illustrators and designers on Instagram and Dribbble. I’ve found them to be inspiring communities that have lead to some little friendships with people from around the world. Outside of that, I love going to events like Creative Mornings, which aren’t always directly related to UX but are always great examples of storytelling, and I leave super inspired and jazzed to get working.
Conferences are awesome but can be an investment, so I try to be mindful and plan to combo them with a vacation (if I can’t get work to sponsor me 😏). I’ve been to HOW Design Live, Brand New, and SXSW (we got free passes for being presenters), but the smaller niche conferences can be just as inspiring.
I went to one called Primer in June all about speculative and critical design, a special interest of mine. In October, I’m headed to Dutch Design Week as it concentrates on designs of the future in all categories, from tech to furniture.
Ultimately, I find you can be inspired outside of the narrow field of UX, and it can help you round out your world view.
Mick’s favorite podcasts include Tristan Harris’ Your Undivided Attention, The Verge’s Why’d You Press That Button, and How Did This Get Made.
Q: What do you want readers to come away with?
It doesn’t have to be so serious, have some fun in this field. Being myself has worked out weirdly wonderfully for me. When I was younger, I had the persona in my mind that I needed to be a certain type of person [to be successful].
Now I say, I am going to draw my clients’ butt and it’s going to work out (yes – we said butts). #BEAUTHENTIC is such a thing now, but it’s true.
Comment below on questions you’d like answered by Mick and other Hexagon UX chapter leads👇
Interested in writing for Hexagon on Medium? Check out our post here.
Hexagon UX is a global community built to empower women and non-binary folks to bring their whole selves to work — building confidence, balancing the ratio in the UX industry, and effecting change on a greater scale while fostering personal and professional growth. Join us on Slack, where we will be continuing the conversation.
