Biography: A Passion for Making Things Easy

When I was little, it was not my goal be a User Experience professional.  In fact, it was no one's goal.  That's because back then, there was no such term and no such profession.

So when anyone asks how I got into this line of work, I think it's a fair question, and I feel obliged to explain myself.

Beginnings

I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up.  

Not that I didn't have interests -- in fact, some said I had too many.  I liked to write -- and, especially, to communicate: to make sure what I wrote could be understood.  I liked to put things together -- stone walls, furniture, living spaces.  I liked to draw.  I liked spacial relations -- jigsaw puzzles, 3D puzzles, maps.  I liked the timing and arc of good drama and comedy.  I liked to play music (piano), and I especially liked arranging music, like vocals in close harmony.  I liked watching baseball games in person -- I loved the tight interactions, tensions and dimensions.  I liked to look at things holistically -- as complex, organic wholes.

Fortunately for me, User Experience came along.  More than anything else, User Experience embraces what I like to do and lets me do a lot of those things.  I get to write, communicate, persuade, design, map things out, put things together, look at the big picture, and craft stories.  You could call it a dream job.

Education

In high school, I played piano and brass instruments, wrote for the school newspaper, and drew cartoons for various publications (teachers were a favorite muse).

At St. Lawrence University, I played more piano, read the classics, wrote up a storm (newspaper, literary) and took up running (which I've been doing ever since -- see my blog).

I got a BA with High Honors, but I needed a career.  I reasoned: I'm interested in just about everything and like to write.  So I got a Masters in Journalism.

Early Career

My first job was at a local newspaper.  I attended local events, got to know everything about how the town worked, and wrote the entire newspaper.  The journalism phase of my career was short but invaluable: I learned how political systems function; I realized how my relationships with everyone around me were key to getting things done; and I doubled my typing speed.  Not bad for a year at a weekly.

The Fledgling Field of Interactive Design

After a year at the newspaper, a friend called and asked if I'd consider a new job.  It involved writing for interactive computer-assisted video.  I wasn't even sure what this meant, but with the lure of doubling my salary, I took the job.

In those days, many of the pioneers doing interface design were writers who produced content and thought logically enough to map out the screen flow.  Over the next several years, I did just that -- creating the content and structuring the interactions for various desktop applications.

At Citibank in the late 1980s, I worked in a new medium -- a screen phone the bank was developing to support home banking.  With 20/20 hindsight, it was the grandparent of today's mobile devices.  This work further honed my skill and passion for simple, impactful interfaces -- with that tiny screen we had to make our customers feel like millionaires. 

Bring on the WWW

For those of us who cut our teeth before the Internet, the emergence of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s turned out to be all we were waiting for.  I jumped in as soon as I could, working on those early sites with HTML rendered mostly in text via a few dozen tags.  I was there when tables revolutionized web layout, when eCommerce exploded beyond anyone's expectations, when many of my peers questioned my career choices and predicted the web's demise.  "Where's the revenue?" a former journalism professor asked.  (Now, that question is asked of newspapers.)

It's all different, it's all the same

It's been fast-paced ever since, as I rode the waves of ever more sophisticated approaches to UX and the dizzying speed of technological change.  For an overview of what I've worked on, see my LinkedIn profile and my resume.

Work has always been an exciting combination of some things remaining the same while everything else changes.  So what never changes?  Answering that question is easy.