10 UXDers, 10 questions, 10 weeks

Week 1, UX origin stories: 10 UXDers, 10 questions, 10 weeks

Learn how our cast of user experience experts got their start.

For our first question, we’re throwing it back to when each of our 10 interviewees found their way to working in user experience. What did they study, what were their key career moves, and how did those steps lead them to where they are today?

Let’s rev up our time machine and travel back to the start of each team member’s UX origin story.

How did you get into user experience?

Wes: Research Operations Coordinator

It was kind of an interesting journey. I originally enrolled as a Psychology major because I didn’t want to go into hard science. After a couple of years, I had an industrial organization class that was one part Human Factors designing physical experiences, and another part training and recruiting people, where my professor talked about Human Factors and Ergonomics Psychology. I took a few more higher level classes with that same professor. Then, I started applying for a Masters and PhD program at North Carolina State University — it was a big move from where I previously was in Louisville, Kentucky.

Originally, I wanted to pursue a PhD, but that changed over time. I did a little bit of student teaching and got a job working at Lenovo, a laptop and computer maker, where I got to apply to the Human Factor and Ergonomics side of my education. The job was a bit of hardware design, designing really nerdy stuff on a keyboard: How does the button press need to feel? How long or how far does each key need to travel down?

I started out doing hardware specification design — not industrial design, but specification about how you lay things out on a laptop. Ten years ago, gestures really weren’t a thing on laptops, so we conducted usability testing to figure out what kind of gestures were needed for swiping, pinching, and zooming. It was really cool, but at that point I was spending 20% of my time doing research and the rest was being a cog in product development. I started looking more into research roles in the software space, and came to Red Hat.

As a full time researcher for the past four and half years, I’ve gotten more in tune with what UX is and what it means. A year ago, I transitioned into a research ops role for our research team. It’s more about how we enable the research team to efficiently and effectively do their job: Perform research.

There’s an interesting quote: “Research ops enables researchers to be effective in a way that they can uniquely be effective and valuable.” We saw a need there and here we are.

Research ops is a new aspect in UX. There are a lot of people who have dedicated recruiters on their teams or procurement paying participants, and research ops is all about consolidating those efforts. Coming from a research background, I think I have a good base on what a researcher needs, and that’s given me a little bit of advantage navigating and establishing processes over time.

Beau: Principal UX Designer

I’ve been working out of college for around 30 years. When I started, I didn’t even know what user experience was. I really started more as a developer. I went to college in the early 90’s: My first major was fashion design. After I was in fashion design courses for six or eight months, I realized it wasn’t for me and switched my major to computer science.

It’s funny if you think about it, the best example is someone that goes into architecture, is someone who is really intrigued by the technical challenges but is also creative. I feel a lot of people who go into UX are the same. You definitely have to be left-brained, right-brained. So I moved into computer science at a time when you were coding on terminals and your output would show up on a mainframe. You’d have to walk across the campus and pick up your output on the mainframe — I did that probably for the same amount of time that I did fashion design. This is kind of the other end of the spectrum, and I realized it wasn’t really for me either.

My undergrad was at a big university (Syracuse University), so I was able to move around to find my place. I ended up in the communication school, which was well-funded — and funded by Apple. I immediately got involved with their big lab, which focused on the beginnings of desktop publishing: How can we move from analogue processes to digital ones? Working in that lab was where I started to get into human-computer interaction. When I graduated, I got a job in IT technology helping companies with their Mac setups and running a big lab at a graphic design company. A lot of visual designers worked at this company, and I helped them digitize. In doing so, I learned HTML.

Soon, I went back to school at New York University for Interactive Telecommunications, a program for technologists who like art, or artists who like technology. The chair of the program tried to recruit people from both backgrounds to collaborate in classes about creating installations. After graduating from NYU, I started working as a developer. I was a full stack developer for about ten years, working with visual designers to do interaction design.

When I decided to move to Boston, I took a job as a prototyper for Verizon. They had a usability lab that was built like a home: It had a kitchen and one-way glass. I started doing these very robust prototypes for them. We would have reporters in and investors, and we built prototypes for television. I prototyped in Macromedia Director and Flash (both of which no longer exist). Then we started using the Microsoft Suite, where we could actually see what users put there. We’d get feedback, and I kind of naturally moved into more of a user experience role. That was my backwards way of getting to UX.

I worked on prototyping mobile phones, and started to do the same for mobile at Verizon. I was involved in the first Apple smartphone, and it was really exciting. My team and I did a lot of concepting around how a company like Verizon could support the direction of mobile devices.

As I moved up in my career, I started doing more managerial tasks and I didn’t prototype at all. I missed it, and wanted to go back and be the prototyper or developer. A few years ago, I got the opportunity to try that with Red Hat. The domain is challenging and we work so closely with developers, so it’s been fun for me. I’m able to engage with the same kind of experience-driven thinking I did for projects in grad school, where we put micro-controls into clothes that communicated with a computer, or toys that tracked user presses and sent data back to a computer to make a song.

It’s all about thinking about how a user interacts with something, which inputs eventually into a computer. You don’t need a keyboard and mouse; you can use a piece of fabric with sensors. I think that’s a really fun way to think about human-computer interaction and experience design.

Roxanne: Associate Manager, User Experience Design

I feel like I was never was not doing user experience. I was always doing user experience. I didn’t find it. I was just always doing it.

I did a lot of art growing up, and I either wanted to be an artist or a lawyer. Maybe they’re very related. I excelled at drawing and coloring in the lines before the other kids could do all those things. The concern with the organization of visual elements, information and persuasive nature of design was evident to me.

When I first started college, the internet… in terms of a formal design program…wasn’t a real thing. So I enrolled in graphic design. This included a lot of tactile design experiences like rapid figure drawing, sculpture and glassblowing. It also included a lot of study on composition, typography and color study. A year after, a new major at my university was created called New Media Design, which was essentially computer graphics, website design, and all that. I immediately transferred majors. It was new, it was fresh, and that was exciting. The combination of foundational design principles and aesthetics mixed with the analytical nature of designing in that medium clicked for me. UX feeds my desire for a creative space that is structured in logic and purpose.

The rest is sort of history. I took on internships and jobs that pushed me further and further into more complex usability. I’ve done website design, interfaces for cameras and kiosks, mobile design, instructional design and a lot of different software. My current work is some of the most complicated I’ve had to work on. Large data sets, complex technical concepts, and illusive users… It’s challenging which makes every day interesting.

I do sometimes miss the tactile nature of more traditional art mediums. There’s something to me far more organic about creating art with your hands, not through a computer. How the physical texture of something feels, and where it takes you.

I absolutely use my artistic skills and traditional design principles in this digital space. I feel my visual design background is a strength for UX design. Whether you’re painting or creating a sculpture or making a print, the layout is very much about positive and negative space. It’s about the readability of the typography. It’s about how you guide your audience through the canvas, digital or not.

Alan: Senior Director, User Experience Design

For me, it was a result of my knowing people who were working in the UX field. This was a very long time ago now, I’m afraid to say a little over 30 years ago. I was finishing my PhD in Applied Linguistics at Boston University and I had friends who were in the experimental psychology department — they were working at a company called Wang Labs as Human Factors Engineers. I met them when I was the coordinator of the psychology department at BU, when I was finishing up a transition between jobs. I was working at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital looking at the long-term effects of low level lead exposure in children. When that study finished, I had a choice to do a post doctorate at Harvard or I had this opportunity at Wang Labs because of the friends that I had who said, Because you’ve done all this human-based research, because you know computers. I had a lot of exposure to data analysis using statistical tools on PCs and mainframes. I had done human-based research and I had connections. And honestly, when I found out how much money I could make working in an industry versus doing a postdoc, it was something I wanted to try. I tried it, I liked it, and so I got my start as part of the Human Factors Engineering team at Wang Labs.

When I was hired, I wasn’t hired as a designer: I was hired to do research and do usability testing. The funny thing was, as soon as I got there, the software was so difficult to use, I ended up doing design work almost right away. The testing was geared toward testing obvious difficult things — and there’s nothing more painful than testing what you know is a bad experience for people. So fixing those design problems at the source would make testing more useful for us. That’s how I got more into design.

Along the way, I ended up working in a medical diagnostics company. One thing I’ve really enjoyed as a human factors and user experience person is the ability to work in different domains. I started off at Wang Labs which sold word processors and imaging systems, then I switched to a company that sold blood gas analyzers. So I designed blood gas analyzers working with industrial designers and the software side of it. I really liked working on embedded systems. I got really excited about working on entire systems, not just on the software side.

Matt: Principal Interaction Designer

I have an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering. I started out working as a hardware engineer many years ago, and I worked on commission. My initial job out of college was with IBM. Then I moved to a company that doesn’t exist anymore, called Wang Laboratories. I was working on hardware to develop our own proprietary hardware CPUs, magnetic storage controllers. I never really designed that much hardware; I got into doing more software and testing, writing a lot of low level software, and a little bit of operating systems work. But I always had a lot of friends who were computer scientists. Because I was very into music when I was younger, and I had a lot of friends who were musicians or people who were not, you know, technical people. And I always found it very interesting when I would have conversations with them about using computers or using software. Their perspective in the way they thought about computers was so much different than the people I worked with who were all engineers or programmers.

I did a Master’s degree at Boston University in the late 1980’s, early 1990’s. At that time, there weren’t really programs in human computer interaction or usability. Most of the people that were in the field at the time were people that had PhDs, and behavioral psychology was more people coming from that background, but I took some courses. I took one course in particular that was actually a sociology course, but talked about how computing affected people in organizations and how computing changes the workplace. After working about 10 years doing very technical work, I decided that I was really much more interested in understanding the human side of computing and how people related to technology. So I was able to get a contract job doing interface design for Windows applications where I did mostly quality assurance and testing work, but I was able to do some usability testing.

Next, I started a job at Eastman Kodak and they had a usability lab, so I was able to run usability tests. Workshops, courses, and learning by doing over a number of years migrated me from doing pure engineering work to being a user experience designer. And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing now, for the better part of the last 25 years.

When it comes to UX, there seems to be three threads of people. There’s people who come at it from the technical side of computer science. There’s the traditional background, which is behavioral sciences, psychology. And then, there’s a lot of kids coming out of school: Most art schools have some kind of interaction design program. I’m approaching it more from an art and design perspective. It’s interesting to see how those different perspectives cross-pollinate. We’re all under the umbrella of user experience design. We have people with a lot of different backgrounds.

​​When I was going to college I had good science and math grades, and engineering just seemed natural. But if I had to do it again, I probably would have gone to design school instead. I think that would have been a more natural fit for me. I like to work on projects and build things and all the typical things you would expect for somebody who wants to get into engineering, but once I got into the field, I didn’t find it as fun and exciting as I expected.

I got very interested in how people related to technology because I think I saw sort of this bigger picture of, we were working in a technology company, and we’re sort of putting stuff out there. And we see that even today when we work with our engineering teams, a lot of times it’s like, okay we could build this feature, and it would be really cool. And then you say, well what will people do with it? And it’s like, oh, I don’t know, but it’ll be really cool.

Technology affects our lives so profoundly, for good and bad: There are a lot of problems that technology causes, too. I felt a lot of times, people who are developers or people who are in technology companies are not always thinking about the broader implications of their work. It’s very important to me to want to think about that and I want to affect that in a positive way through my work. Working on some esoteric technical problem, even though that was interesting, it was too far removed from people and how people actually interacted with computers. Thinking about usability, thinking about how we design things so that they’re easy, and really work for people without expecting them to adapt to complications. It’s all about understanding the user’s mental model and how they perceive the task or whatever they’re working on. Very often, that’s different from how an engineer might approach the process.

Joe: UX Developer

I’ve been a front end developer my whole career. Before user experience specialists existed, developers, the front end developers, were on the front lines of UX. And that was it. There wasn’t a lot of other input. It was maybe developers and product management getting together and stating, This is what we need. These are the requirements that we have for our customers. And then it was mostly the developer who would come up with screen flows and layouts.

Then user experience teams came along. I remember when I was working at a previous company, where 2 or 3 of our development staff decided to attend a degree program called Human Factors, and they eventually became our UX team. And that’s how our UX group started, and also about the time when an official UX presence became visible in many software organizations. One of the original pioneers in that group came to Red Hat to join UXD and I followed suit. So yeah, just being on the front end development track while in an organization that prioritized UX, is how I got here.

At Red Hat, as a UXD developer, I’m embedded into the OpenShift Console Team, and I also get to be a part of the UXD organization at the same time. So my development role is part of the engineering team helping to create the console, and then I get to work on PatternFly and understand a little bit more about where the designers are coming from. I work more closely with the designers this way, and if there’s a requirement for a new component for OpenShift, then I can pitch that to PatternFly folks or even help implement it in the PatternFly repo. And there are times that new components are designed by UXD, but implemented in OpenShift, and later contributed back to PatternFly.

It’s a really interesting position, there’s a lot to do, and there’s an unlimited amount of opportunity to contribute. For OpenShift; there are always new features, always new enhancements. On the PatternFly side, other platforms are always requesting new components and other changes. So the role provides for different development tasks which is fun because you’re not always working on the same project. I get to move out of the OpenShift role for some time and then put on my PatternFly hat, then go back. That shakes things up a little so the day to day experience isn’t always the same.

Our UX meetings are always quite different. Because it’s mostly from a UX or design perspective there’s a creative spin on topics, and because there are also developers, you get to stimulate both sides of your brain.

Shiri: Senior User Experience Designer

I found my way into UX because I was looking for something to learn after I finished my military service, went abroad, and traveled. I thought about something technical because I’m a very technical person, so I studied Instructional Technologies, which is a degree that combines computer science, psychology, and design. During that time, we had a course called user experience. And it just clicked, this is what I want to do. It combined everything into one place. I thought it was really interesting and started working on a bunch of projects that had to do with design. By the last year of my studies, I started working in something completely different, in sales. But I kind of leaned into that room where the designer and the technology people were sitting, and kept bugging them. So I ended up learning what they did in actual day to day work.

In Israel, most people start college late. Everything’s late here. After the military, most people travel the world. You’ll always see Israelis traveling everywhere after their army service. I went to the United States and traveled for six months. Then I went to South and central America, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica. I traveled for 18 months in total. Came back and started my studies. And after I studied, I started working for a startup company as the lead UX. That startup company was acquired by Red Hat which led me to work in the UXD team.

Marie: Interaction Designer

Long story short, when I was a kid, I wanted to code websites. I had a blog about my favorite singer. And I really enjoyed spending time creating horrible designs and trying to understand HTML and CSS. After elementary school, I had a weak moment because my friends went to a business academy high school and I went to study economics and accounting, too. After three years, I realized that I really didn’t like it. In the meantime, I got my first offer to create a website for a driving school. However, I was able to zip the file as one of the few girls in the class. And this is why I went to study systems engineering.

During college, I mainly focused on graphic design, websites, and other materials. Later on, I worked in a marketing agency. But I grew to want to know more than just make things pretty and perfect. And that’s why I chose UX as a main topic for my master’s thesis, and Red Hat gave me the opportunity to work on their product. That’s how it started.

The main difference between my time in marketing and UX is in how projects progress. When you work in an online marketing agency, everything needs to be pixel perfect, and delivered the same day without any research without anything else around it. You don’t focus on quality, you focus on quantity, because you are creating a lot of things like LinkedIn images and Instagram photos, too.

Allie: Senior Interaction Designer

I’d never heard of user experience before I was in college. I went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for electrical engineering and realized I hated it — mostly because the other EE students were afraid to speak to me because I was female. And that was scary. I was trying to figure it out: I still loved engineering, but I needed a profession where people are social. I happened to get an on-campus research job, just for money, evaluating different voting systems. They were looking for someone personable to talk to people: I wanted to do that! While I was there, I found out the research was actually called a usability study. I was running participants through the test, getting their feedback, and having a lot of fun doing it. Then, I took that data back to the team and they tweaked the product accordingly. Once I realized I liked working in that space, I found my answer to how I could stay in an engineering-like field with more social components.

That job inspired me to switch my major to engineering and anthropology. I kind of made my ownUX program: How do you research with humans? And then how do you apply that to technology? After undergrad, I went to grad school in a Human Factors program then started my career in hardware design. That’s where my passion was, but I found out there weren’t that many jobs in it. So I decided to give Red Hat a shot — do it for one or two years, see if I like it. And it’s been seven years since. So I guess I like it! Cool.

I don’t use the electrical part of my degree very much, but the engineering part I do. I don’t consider myself creative. I have that engineering mentality of, “What’s the problem? How do we solve it?” And then I do my best to make it pretty. Problem-solving, coming up with new solutions, and testing them comes from that background. I like to generate as many ideas as possible, then throw out the bad ones. And then hopefully, there’s at least one left over.

Margot: Interaction Designer

I discovered user experience when I first started college. I’d never even heard about it before. I decided to major in business with a concentration in marketing, because I’d always been interested in art and economics, and I felt like going into business school and doing marketing would potentially allow me to combine both of those. Be creative, but with a business side. So I did that, and I decided I didn’t want to only concentrate in marketing, because it felt too restrictive. So I expanded my concentrations to management information systems, and through that, I discovered UX. We had classes on agile development, waterfall development, you know. All those different methodologies in terms of how products can be developed and what their product cycle can be. Within those classes, one of the projects was to design an app from start to finish. It was more oriented toward data management and was less design-oriented, but we did have to use Balsamiq to create wireframes. And I just remember thinking that was really cool. That’s when I started thinking, “Oh, this is something I could see myself doing,” because I’d always been very undecided about where I wanted to go.

From there, I started to get involved with clubs, and thought about how I could get more UX experience within school before looking for internships. I joined the Business Technology club at Boston University, in my last semester. One of my friends was part of the executive board, and he was telling me about how they were doing a UX project that semester, and anyone could join. This one leader acted as our product manager of sorts, walking us through the UX process from start to end.

For the project, we basically redesigned the student link, BU’s portal website where students go to select and see their classes and other information. It didn’t actually get implemented, but I volunteered to be the one to create the wireframes and high fidelity mocks to gain some real UX design experience. From there I decided to get a master’s in Emerging Media Studies, which allowed me to take classes on design, UX, data analysis, and research. There were also a lot of human computer interaction classes, so I got to learn more about how humans interact with technology. During my Master’s I ended up doing a product design internship and eventually got an internship at Red Hat, on the User Experience Design team. And the rest is history!

Stay tuned each week as we share more experiences and expertise from these friendly faces.

Explore the series:

• Week 0: Meet the team
• Week 1: UX origin stories
• Week 2: Wish they knew
• Week 3: Creating a standout UX portfolio
• Week 4: Rituals for creativity
• Week 5:Work-life balance
• Week 6: Productivity tools
• Week 7: The future of UX
• Week 8: Learning from failure
• Week 9: Defining success
• Week 10: Working with open source

Have a story of your own? Write with us! Our community thrives on diverse voices — let’s hear yours.