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| My college experience was focused on Civil Engineering, and Architectural Design. I chose these fields because I enjoyed the challenge posed by, problem solving, analysis, and design. I went to work in retail and enjoyed helping people by trying to understand what they want. What I enjoyed most about my time working in retail was working at toy stores and Blockbuster, because you would have to spend time with the customer and understand their personality and goals quickly, then come up with a solution that would make them satisfied.
While working in retail, I was often frustrated with the UX design of the programs that would run the daily operations of the business. There are two main reasons for this.
The first is because when I would train a new employee in a task they would often struggle to quickly learn the program, not because it was difficult but because there were problems with the design. This could cause a newer employee to be wary of helping a customer to the best of their ability out of fear of looking silly in front of a customer. My goal has always been to help people and make them feel better, and this scenario makes both the new employee and the customer unhappy.
The second is that the user flows of many of these often repeated tasks are much more convoluted than necessary . This results in even veteran employees avoiding helping a customer with a simple task because even the most basic of searches that should take 5 seconds, end up taking many steps and several minutes.
I believe a good design is easy to understand and learn for a new user, but also has tools to make tasks more time efficient for advanced and heavy users.
What I want to bring to the industry is to be able to meet with clients and by using my 20 years of experience understanding clients needs, to build a package that will make their lives easier every day.
After my last employer became insolvent, I had an opportunity to reevaluate my career goals and my contribution to the community. As a result I determined that pursuing a career in UX design would provide the career challenges and personal growth opportunities in which I would find significant satisfaction.
I was worried that going into design professionally would make me enjoy it less as a hobby. So I avoided mixing work and passion.
However over time, I have realized that I focused on the design aspects of any job I worked at, and only learned to enjoy it more. There is no reason to avoid working in a job you love doing.
After a year long design internship I am more convinced that design work is the right fit for me, and am looking to find a good team of people who I can share my passion for design with.