Interface Lovers Interview

Last week I was featured on Interface Lovers, a site that “put[s] the spotlight on designers who are creating the future and touching the lives of many.” Read my response to their first question about what led me into design.

What led you into design?

In some ways, I feel like I’ve always been designing, and in other ways, I feel like I stumbled into it without realizing it. I’ve been into art and drawing since I could hold a pencil, taking art classes and doodling throughout my childhood. Then in high school, I signed up for a web design class. The summer before the class even started I was so excited that I bought a book on web development — “Learn HTML in 24 hours” — and taught myself how to build web pages. By the time the school year started, I had already put a website online. Being able to create something that anyone, anywhere in the world could immediately see was completely intoxicating to me.

From there, I went down a rabbit hole of learning Photoshop, Illustrator, 3D modeling, Flash, and any creative technologies even vaguely related to web design. That led me to get a degree in Graphic Communication at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, with a concentration in new media. Back then (early 2000s), there weren’t many web design programs, and the ones that existed were shoe-horned into graphic design and art programs. Cal Poly’s graphic communication program was the most technical of the bunch.

As part of my degree at Cal Poly, I took a computer science class and learned C and Java. I found programming to be super fun, too and went deeper down the stack into backend technologies and database development. Basically, anything tangentially related to web development interested me, so I took every class I could.

After college, I went down the programming path and got a job as a data warehouse developer. I went technical because the analytical nature of it meant you know if your work is good — it either works, or it doesn’t. I found design to be very subjective and didn’t feel confident that my web design work was “good” (however that might be measured).

I joined a small company, so I was doing database design, ETLs, backend programming, frontend programming, and UI design. Over time I discovered that updating the interface, even minor updates, elicited strong positive reactions and gratitude from customers, whereas re-factoring a database to cut query times in half rarely did. I realized I wanted to work closer to the customer.

I started spending more time designing user interfaces and studying usability testing. I discovered it married the analytical, scientific part of my brain (which drew me to programming in the first place) to the subjective, intuitive part. This was the tool I needed to “prove” my designs were “right” (which I now know isn’t exactly true, but it felt this way back then).

This made me want to formally study design, so I got my master’s degree at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. The program is the study of technology, broadly speaking — how technology impacts society, how it changes people and their lives, and how to build technology with the needs of people at the center of it. The program was great. It only had a few required classes, then you could take basically whatever you wanted. So I took classes that sounded the most fun and interesting — design, programming, psychology, research, product development, business, and more. I learned a ton about product development and user-centered design while I was there.

One of my favorite classes was behavioral economics for the web class, in which we explored how to apply behavioral economics principles to web sites and use A/B testing to measure their impact. That led me to join Optimizely after grad school, which at the time (2012) was just a simple A/B testing product for the web. I started out doing UI engineering, then switched into product design as the company grew. When I officially became a product designer I felt like I fell into it by accident. It was a result of what the company needed as it grew, not my specific career goal. But when I looked back over what led me there I realized I had always been designing in one way or another.

The company was growing fast, so I was presented the opportunity to move into management. I was resistant at first, but when I realized I could have a bigger impact in that position, I jumped on it. Eventually, my boss left, and I became the Head of Design, leading a team of product designers, user researchers, and UI engineers.

After 5 and a half years at Optimizely, I was ready for a break and new challenges, so I left and took some time off. I realized I wanted to be hands-on again and ended up joining Casetext as a product designer. They’re building legal research tools for lawyers, which pushed me to be a better designer because I was designing for people with expertise I don’t have and can’t acquire.

After a few months, it wasn’t the right fit, so now I’m at Gladly managing their product design team. It feels great to be in management again, working cross-functionally to deliver great experiences to our customers, while growing and nurturing the talents of my team.

Read the full interview on Interface Lovers.