What or who sparked your interest in UX research/design?
Through my love of BMX, I became hooked on bike graphics and stickers, often drawing them all over my school books. This interest led me to take O-levels in both graphic design and graphic communication and then further expand my interest in letterforms through graffiti and signwriting. My graphic design teacher suggested I consider applying for art college – which at the time, I didn’t know such places existed. My application was successful, and I studied technical illustration for a couple of years which set me up well for starting in commercial illustration and graphic design. Who knows where I may have ended up had my teacher not nudged me in the right direction?
What was your route into working within the field of User Experience?
After a few years in publishing, design consultancies and advertising agencies, a new field of web design started to emerge. I was soon drawn into creating visuals for websites but nothing more than individual pages. Fast forward into this millennium, and I was Head of Design within a small design consultancy, where I was mainly focused on brand and print work but noticed there were continued problems delivering web-based projects. Using my publishing experience, I suggested we take a fresh look at our approach to these. Suggested we mimic our publication process, creating a flat plan (map) for all the pages and content for the website project. This could be shared with our client to sign off before we build anything. This was successful, and at that time, I didn’t know sitemaps and wireframes were actual things. Once I discovered the field of information architecture, I started exploring further and loved the way that, within the field of UX, you could test, learn and base your ideas on real data rather than subjective views. This, plus the ability to amplify the users’ voices to deliver successful results for them and our clients, really appealed to me. After that, I moved to focus solely on UX.
This is my own exert, but if you’d like to read the whole article head on over to the FutureLearn Medium blog.