Please give a brief background on yourself and your career.
I graduated from Wellesley in 2006 with a double major in English and Media Arts & Sciences. After graduation, I worked as a visual designer for a small marketing, design & web development shop in Boston. After coming to the realization that UX was my one true love, I moved to the UX team at Arnold Worldwide.
How has your career changed since you originally envisioned it at Wellesley? What other careers did you consider as a student?
I knew pretty early on that I wanted to do something that involved art, communication, and the Internets; although I wasn’t entirely sure what form the job title would ultimately take.
How has Wellesley contributed to your career?
WLZY was a huge part of my life at Wellesley, and, along with the Knapp Internship Program was the catalyst for my path to UX. Running publicity for WLZY provided the opportunity to test and learn prolifically. Every poster, web page, or other piece of media became a mini-challenge to learn something new, and I’d taught myself Creative Suite inside and out by the time I graduated.
What is a typical work day or work week like for you?
My day-to-day varies a lot depending on the projects I’m working on. It could mean conducting interviews and then going heads-down to comb the results for patterns and narrative themes. Or flying out to a client’s headquarters to facilitate worksessions and scrawling user journeys or wireflows on giant whiteboards like a crazy person. Or working with business strategy to sort out how a client’s business objectives translate to the experience of the actual consumers using their product/service. The common theme, though, is that I am always collaborating with other people. That may be my very favorite part of my job.
What piece of advice would you offer students looking to get into this industry?
Never stop being curious. Ever.
Also, don’t get tunnel vision about acquiring technical skills. The intellectual curiosity and critical thinking that you nurture at Wellesley will be your greatest assets in the tech/design world. Knowing how to effectively identify and communicate with multiple audiences (consumer, client-side or agency-side) is paramount.
Be confident! Be fearless! Embrace your mistakes.
What do you wish you had known as a student?
Pick a major based on what skill sets it will empower you with, regardless of its feeder status for your desired career path. I didn’t major in HCI, or Interaction Design, or Marketing, or Advertising. But, English taught me everything about storytelling. It attuned me to the subtle nuance of character development, to what makes people tick. It strengthened my empathy. All things that I rely on every day as a UX designer.
MAS helped me discover the sheer joy of making – of building and shipping something even if it was teeny tiny. It also marked the end of my obsession with trying to be the best and the beginning of my love affair with an unabashedly, inherently unmasterable field. Experience design, or really any job related to the Internet, never stops changing for long enough for any one human to become an expert at it. Every day you start fresh, and that’s what makes it fun.
If you could come back and take one class at Wellesley what would it be?
Econ 101. At work, I focus on the individual user’s needs and behaviors – it would be interesting to zoom out and study the behavioral trends of the giant complex system that is the global economy.