Like a million other designers, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in visual art, design, architecture, or some creative endeavor. I remember redrawing scenes from comic books and magazines when I saw a character or typographic lockup I thought was cool. This stuff has always been in my DNA, and it’s something that is always on my mind. My psychologist tells me Perceptual Reasoning is my primary strength. My focus in college was graphic design and photography, but by the time I was lucky enough to find myself in grad school, I was studying interactive design full-time.
Graduate studies were a trip. I found myself attending a self-directed program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, feeling terribly outclassed by more accomplished classmates, and wanting to evolve what I had learned about photography and graphic design. It was during this time that I bought my first computer, pirated Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver, and started learning how to make websites. I was hooked by the ability to string screens together and then publish that on the web for all to see. To me, that was magic.
My natural strengths and experimentation during school have carried me through a 15+ year career, with some twists and turns along the way. I started out understanding the need for balance between visuals and the experience of moving through the architecture of a website or app. Over time, though, I realized I needed to think more about the market and the users of the project. This was the only way to fill in the missing areas of the map. We’ll talk more about change in a minute, but for now, I want to start at the beginning.
Interactivity
Growing up with Nintendo, PlayStation, games like Myst, and seeing hardware x software inventions like my little sister’s Tamagotchi were all visuals you could touch and interact with. It was next-level to go from reading magazines, comic books, and art books to interacting with environments and surfaces that took visual art to the next level. They’re mostly all lost now, but at one point early in my development as a designer, it seemed like almost every website was made with Macromedia Flash. While these weren’t always the most usable experiences, they were rich in music, video, animation, and type. What had once been a very simple, almost print-like approach to online experiences became cinematic. It seemed like this type of rich media was the future, but then one day, things changed.
The iPhone
There was the web, and then there was the iPhone. Where there was once a designer interested in the web, there was now a designer hungry to design for the next big platform. The iPhone brought responsive web and app design, marking a huge shift in the emerging professional field of UX and product design. It’s so funny to think that just 10 years ago we were using Photoshop to design screens for iPhone apps, and now we have tools built strictly for the purpose of mobile native design.
This change was fairly easy: learn new systems with stricter and easier standards than the web, pick up new tools (Sketch), and you’re off! Still, I carried with me a solid foundation in visual design, graphic design, and photography. I knew that this was an interactive medium, but in a way, I still treated it like a series of flat pictures that we click on. There was more to the story.
More than just visuals
By the time I got to Pivotal, I’d been designing for six or seven years, and I was about to have my whole world challenged. At Pivotal, they did research, testing, leaned heavily on teamwork and collaboration, and most of all, they were very focused on product strategy. They asked questions like “why are we doing this?”, “what’s the right thing to build?”, “what jobs are the users trying to get done?”. I resisted these questions at first. They pierced the very heart of me as a designer. It slowly dawned on me that I was going through a very painful growth process, realizing that doing design is not about going into a dark corner and coming out long enough to throw work over the fence to engineers. We worked as a squad, researched together, prioritized together, designed together, and demoed together. If this was a clinic rehabilitating my skillset, I was not a good patient.
In time, I adapted to Pivotal’s ways of working. I came to understand the difference between dogma and the necessary. I had learned a huge array of tools for any type of situation. Visual design was no longer the only tool in my toolbox; I had learned facilitation, brainstorming, research, synthesis, testing, cross-functional collaboration, and prototyping. I thought a part of me had died, and while I was excited to move to a new phase of my career, I didn’t yet realize how well my time at Pivotal would serve me.
Startups need strong strategists
Fresh and ready to move on from the 3-month rotation approach at Pivotal, I was eager to go deep on a more mature platform. When I came on board at Strava, they were in the middle of a reckoning around their privacy controls. This story is well-documented in my case studies, but the TLDR is that leading design on their newly branded Trust & Safety team, I would be called upon to leverage many of the techniques I’d learned at Pivotal. I was confronted with a terrific realization: that I could never have delivered such a successful body of work in such ambiguity if it hadn’t been for my time at Pivotal.
I’d grown
Over the years, I had grown so much despite times when I felt I was losing myself, or what I loved to do, or how I loved to do it. I’d not only grown more skilled and able to engage ambiguity, but I’d grown confident about my ability to engage ambiguity. After Strava, I was ready for a new challenge, and I was so lucky to land a job at SRAM, working on software x hardware interfaces. Talk about complex and ambiguous. This work enabled me to understand the layers of complexity of industrial design, supply chain, electrical engineering, firmware development, and of course software development for hardware and HMIs. SRAM taught me so much about the need for strong role definition, coordination, and communication in complex, multi-billion-dollar projects that stretch over years. But what’s probably more important is that it again exposed my attraction to complexity and problem-solving.
Throughout the changes in technology, design software, techniques, and problem spaces, there is a thread that speaks to my fascination with new, complex spaces, and wanting to jump into them. Tech itself is just this - a space that continually evolves and disrupts itself, requiring the participants (passengers?) to continually reassess and adjust to change. Like sailing the vast and unpredictable ocean, I’ve had to absorb change, adjust to new conditions, and correct my sail. I started out as an art student looking to paint pictures of digital experiences and got so much more - a ship and a star to sail her by.
