An Interview with Kate Johnson, UCI Master of Human-Computer Interaction & Design Grad
Kate Johnson is a passionate designer based in Washington, D.C. She works as a Senior Product Designer at USA Today Network (Gannett). Kate received her B.F.A in Advertising with a concentration in Art Direction from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2016, and completed her master’s at the University of California Irvine (UCI) in Human-Computer Interaction and Design in 2020. She has harnessed her advertising background to work on global and national advertising campaigns; and her skills in UI/UX for work on the 2019 Local Elections and 2020 Presidential Primaries, as well as work with nonprofit, Start Giving Local.
Originally from Altoona, PA, Kate moved to Saudi Arabia with her family at six-weeks-old and spent the next sixteen years growing up in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. She moved to Houston in 2010, where her family currently resides. Kate is an avid sportswoman who has a passion for running, traveling, and trying new food.
You’re recent grad of the MHCID program and you were nominated for the Orange County Business Journal Innovator of the Year Award. Can you tell me a little bit about how that nomination came to be?
Six months ago we started our capstone project, which is part of the course with MHCID. The capstone project is about taking the skills that we’ve learned throughout the program and applying them to a project for the client. We were paired with a nonprofit client called Start Giving Local. My team and I worked closely with Kelly, the founder of Start Giving Local. And after a couple of months of working with her, she approached me asking if she could nominate me for the award.
Could you tell me a little bit about the capstone project your team did for her?
Yes, of course. Start Giving Local focuses on empowering individuals to make giving easy while also participating in endurance events. So they encourage people within their community to participate in endurance events — like running, cycling, or triathlons — and help them fundraise for charity while also supporting local businesses through partnerships.
Our task was to provide users with a more important experience while incorporating global technology. The client gave us the option to go in any direction that we found to be appropriate. Having such an open project allowed us to actually use all the skills that we developed throughout the year and practice them with our client.
So what were some of those skills that you learned throughout the year that you were then able to put into action in this project?
We decided as a group to do the Double Diamond process, which really focused on research and then development design. So first we tried to discovered what we were really trying to solve, define it, and then make sure it was working. For the first 10 weeks we dedicated ourselves just to research. We started from the beginning and did a comparative analysis and heuristic evaluation. Start Giving Local had just launched a new site, so we were able to look at it and note its strengths, but also some improvements that could be made. We also looked at the current market environment to understand how they are positioned compared to other organizations.
That really helped us to identify where we wanted to focus our research. We used all the skills we’d learned in the previous six months to conduct a survey and interviews. We then identified our goal and who our user was, which helped us understand what gap currently existed within the market.
The research we did definitely drove a lot of our designs afterwards. Every time we were making a design decision, we would look back at our research and say, “Is this fitting? Are we really solving or identifying what those goals were in our final product?”
What do you think it was about your work that made Kelly decide to nominate you for the Orange County Business Journal Innovator of the Year Award?
At the beginning of the capstone project, I volunteered to be the project manager. I was heavily involved with research and design and all the projects in between; I was also in charge of organizing our schedule, making sure that all the meetings were set, and that we were meeting our deadlines. I made sure that, as a group, we were communicating with one another remotely effectively. And I also just made sure that we were really in sync with one another.
Kelly said she was nominating me because of the leadership I showed on the project. I made sure that we had all the materials that we needed to succeed, and were using the right methods as well. Even though I’ve been nominated, I think every nomination always has a team to back them. I really could not have done it without my team.
What is something that you’ve learned from the capstone project that you think you’ll take with you as you move forward in your career?
I learned how to work collaboratively with people from a distance. It’s funny to think that the whole project was done during COVID-19 and none of us actually ever met up in person for the project. We crafted ways to work collaboratively, even though we were remote.
I learned a lot about how to pick up on other people’s work styles and also figure out what strengths they can bring to a project. Getting to know the team and understanding what everyone could contribute to the project really helped the project to be successful.
Is there anything else that you would want readers to know?
At the beginning of the project, the fact that it was so wide open was a worry, because it was very hard to concentrate and it also led to a lot of second guessing ourselves and wondering if we were going in the right direction.
But I think that also reflected real life. A lot of times you’re going to be in a place in your career where there’s no clear answer to what you’re trying to solve — it’s up to you to figure that out. We had to meet that challenge. As students, we had to make sure we were doing well by our client. It taught us a valuable lesson. You need to be uncertain sometimes, but that uncertainty shows that you will keep digging and you will come to an answer. It may just take a lot longer than you thought it would.
