Rickrack

I work as a Digital Product Designer...

What does that mean? Well, I work for a company that makes software tools for a niche industry. My work is interesting. It suits me because I wear different hats to accomplish my work. Sometimes I have to interview stakeholders, which helps me expand my soft skills. I think this was the hardest for me as a people pleaser and having a mild phobia of interacting. I was lucky to have a supervisor a few years ago who saw where I was strong and encouraged me to exercise my ability to walk through my designs more efficiently and gave me some scripts for some of the thornier situations that arise. Like... how to handle when asked to design something and the research and my experience say that the request is not the best approach for that feature. He made me talk about Accessibility and UX Writing for the entire company. It was scary, but many people write me off as useless when they see me so I appreciated that he let me grow into something out of my comfort zone, as opposed to thinking I will never learn (I was told a few times that I won't get promoted because I lacked something but the manager never told me how to grow into the role). Other than talking, I analyze information and design new features and sometimes new tools. There are a lot of constraints, but I find them to work well for what I do. A UI Kit ensures we use reusable components, and keeping to the spacing, typography and colors ensures that all the tools I work on are consistent. And I adore consistency haha! I admire people who can design stunning marketing sites on the fly but I think working on enterprise tools, where I tidy up information is more in line with who I am.

The path to where I am now was a winding one. When I was born my field wasn't a thing, beyond a few pioneers doing the computer-human interaction research I lean heavily in my day-to-day now. Of course, I wanted to be an astronomer as a child. I adored space. My father got me a space photo book that was probably half my height. So first astronomy. Then I realized I suck at math. I switched my dream to astronaut. I realized I would hate the food (I have some sensory issues with food). I wanted to be a pediatric psychologist (I was delayed early in school and feared I wouldn't be able to complete a doctorate in a reasonable amount of time). In High School, I decided I wanted to be a fashion designer. I remember drafting a pattern for a dress and thinking, I would love to do this as a career. So after my High School graduation, I moved to Florida to study Fashion Design. I hadn't touched a computer so I didn't know much about the Internet beyond the fact that it existed (this was the Y2K era after all). In college, a buddy of mine introduced me to HTML. God, I was so hooked. I switched tracks to Interactive Media Design and spent the rest of my college years making dumb CD-ROM games, designing websites with spiffy Web 2.0 gel buttons, and making... Flash sites. It was a fun era, a bit of a Wild West, smack in the middle of the Frutiger Aero era and before RWD made our digital world boxy and Google made flat design standard.

I've been designing for 8 years now. I used to code front-end because I knew code and design but became tired of working with colleagues who enjoyed making fun of other people's code. I felt their time would have been better served mentoring those whose code they hated. I wanted to help instead of worrying about code styles, so I switched to UX 8 years into my tech career. It's not as cool as space stuff but hey, less math, right?