About Me
Following the Breadcrumbs
Looking back, my path to UX Design feels long but fortuitous. I wanted a career that was challenging and engaging — something that involved some creativity and visual design, but also practicality and logic. I didn’t have a map, and I didn’t know my destination.
Through my creative interests growing up, my clumsily selected college major, and my experience working in the service industry, I built skills and nurtured talents that eventually would point me in the right direction.
Management
My time working in restaurants gave me opportunities to flex my creative muscles by designing menus and restaurant websites as well as organizing workflows to maximize efficiency in order to provide great service. Additionally, my experience in management roles taught me the importance of creating solutions for multiple users, as I was responsible for both my staffs’ and my customers’ needs.
Architecture
My experience in architecture school developed my fundamental design skills, gave me practice with various creative software, and most of all pushed me to realize the power of perseverance.
Photography
Through my photography studies from high school through college, I trained my visual eye, sharpened my technical skills, and practiced critical and collaborative design critique.
Detail Oriented
The Long Version
My background in photography, architecture, and restaurant management created the perfect storm of attributes and skills to prepare me for a career in UX design. I’ve already spent significant time developing my visual design eye, technical design skills using various drafting programs for architecture, user empathy from my time working in the service industry and managing staff, explaining design decisions through all of the above, and I have practiced creating solutions to user problems for customers and coworkers in the service industry.
I took photography classes throughout high school, learning how to shoot on a manual camera with real film and developing my own prints. I took digital photo classes in college, one again practicing using manual controls on a digital camera, and also pushing my creative eye in a staged photography class that encouraged the creation of surreal photographs while using minimal amounts of digital manipulation. I loved learning about and producing photography, but I felt like I should study something more practical as a college major: so I chose architecture.
Majoring in architecture turned out to be really really hard. My studio classes were a huge challenge for me, my final required studio class for graduation proving to be the hardest hurdle for me to clear. I ended up “graduating” without completing my last studio class, vowing to finish it over the upcoming summer. It didn’t go as planned so I started working at a cafe. I needed a break from the grind of architecture school and I might as well work on gaining other professional and life experience in the meantime. Four years later, I went back and completed my final studio class. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done, but I made it through.
I chose to work in the service industry to challenge my social anxiety, to push myself to do the thing that made my stomach turn: talking to new people over and over. Not only did I get really good at talking to strangers, I also got really good at figuring out solutions for peoples’ problems. Whether it was navigating a food allergy or listening to feedback about how things were organized around the restaurant and implementing creative solutions to get people what they needed, my time in restaurants taught me to put users (customers and coworkers) front and center, and to problem solve around a user.