My personal UX journey

If you look at resumes and LinkedIn profiles you'll notice that some people's job titles go in a straight progressive line, and others are less obvious of the direction.

Many Career paths I see out there just by looking at LinkedIn:

My career path has been much more driven by Interactive (web) graphic design. When you have had a range of experiences that all lend to that central theme in different ways, it's not a straight line! I just want to clear that up that when I explain this on an interview, so I won't receive the mocking sorta condescending (disbelieving) half-smile:

I have to mention, If you have done a range of things in many places you become a UNICORN. It transcends that stair-step style because variety on a career path shows great amounts of stamina, creativity and breadth of knowledge. That's why I pull out samples of my experiences rather than: here's a title! here's a title, here's a title! In a title, you don't really know everything done. In project work, contracts, and working in task mode, you can tell a person specifically what the client's needs were and what you've done.

Applying for jobs can be hard if you don't know, from a posting, what their particular need is. You feel like you are a waitress in a restaurant:

"Hi, I'd like to order a large coke" says the client.

Waitress responds in a coverletter. "Hello my name is Susie Q, I am very good at serving large cokes to people sitting at tables. I've worked at several diners for 13 years, and my specialty is pouring a drinks in a glass, bring it to a table, and setting it down before the customer in a friendly way!"

Customer says "No I just wanted a coke, you don't have to tell me all that"

The waitress says "My education in serving drinks is from the Hospitality course at Red River College where I earned a diploma!"

The customer says "Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Thanks, can you just get me a coke please?"

The waitress says "If you are interested in my getting you a coke, please email me here for an interview!"

And that's how silly it feels to write a cover letter when you KNOW the company has specific needs, but they don't mention it in their job posting. Your stuck saying "Me me me".

I would like to make my resume more of a journey map or info map than a resume because that would provide a clearer idea. It would be like a waitress giving you a menu, and you can just pick what you want, and hire me! When listed, I fear a reader would be sent into a land of complexity. and not really understand what my central theme is! However, one shouldn't try to upload an infographic resume into an Indeed, lol!

For me, it's front end development and graphic design that brought me to the land of UX. Most User Experience Designers have a "level" of web development along with design, and what makes me different is I am steeped in both. They say it's rare. A Unicorn is! It sounds like a mythical creature and people don't believe it and give me half-smiles when I describe my experiences but it's a real thing. I actually do have 20 years' experience, and yes I can help you! And I'm not slowing down anytime soon. Here are all the jobs I can easily fit into:

Designing a career path is easy. The hard part is in the implementation. It is really difficult to emulate the first diagram I presented over a course of several jobs, starting a business, and freelancing. A straight line Career path happens in mostly one job in one corporation. If you have gained a skillset from a variety of sources, many of the titles are not very explanatory, and not very obvious how they make up the whole professional palette. In my days as a designer, most of it was self-discovery, we weren't encouraged to draw up "career paths". An essential part of my career path was discovering my specialization in the field, and it happened in 3 ways:

1) deciding what I wanted to do

2) being assigned tasks that fell on my aptitude which I may or may not have appreciated at the time, but sometimes these annoying experiences lead me somewhere I was so glad I was lead!

3) Assessing from my experiences which are valuable to me in my career path, and the realization of who I am and not only what I want to do, but my real true purpose

I knew instantly once I tried interactive design back in college in 1990 it was for me. I knew it was the future and I knew that's where I was going, even though at first I took an Advertising Art course and I was expecting to do TV commercials. But I didn't know where the winding road would take me. The future wasn't here yet, and old school jobs were what you applied to. There was no internet! Employers tended to post jobs that in practice were quite different than the design practice usually is, and that also threw me into another land after that! The land that lead me to be UX Evangelist (in my own mind anyway) where I learned all about how stakeholder-control of product design was usually quite terrible both for my portfolio and for their customers! I'm sorry I have to say that. I won't bother going on about "my portfolio" since that's no way to sell myself as a designer, but definitely it hurts YOUR BUSINESS if you don't care about User Experience. And it's going up exponentially.

On the linear scale, we see that the entire history of user experience is nothing compared with the likely future of the field. The line hugs the x-axis so closely that we can’t tell the difference between the birth of the field and the present day. Around the year 2020, the curve will finally start bending, and the subsequent years will be a true rocket ride. For all practical purposes, the growth in UX is still to come.

In the old days, the way to overcome client-driven design is to remind the client about their "target market". The advantage of this is, it took away some of the notions that a company is really building website and ads to the taste of the CEO, and targetted those they were selling to. That makes perfect sense. The part that is harder to grasp for most people is that your own experience with your products and the designer's experience benchmarking with each other is still not enough! You actually do have to test it on REAL users. I mean users that use your product the normal way a customer who has never used it before, would. Even designers will push their ideas too, and that's also wrong, and I have always been keen NOT to do that. But when I don't push my ideas, the clients start to push theirs, and then the mark is missed! The disadvantage was: but they still did a lot of guesswork as to their client's tastes and needs and so much of their own biases and needs were always pushed onto the designs, and I really couldn't say anything because they signed the cheque.

And that was my portfolio folks! I was a human pencil to draw of designs to suit the personal tastes of the clients, the Good the Bad and the Downright Ugly! My true problem-solving was hard to do when you are locked in this position!

But UX frees the design process from the designer's bias and the client's bias and really defends the USER. And that is really important to me, because it's neutral, it's effective, and no one gets hurt. Well, except for clients that still want to control the design to suit what they think. Oh dear, what can you do?

Here's what I worry about now in my career, that I finally see opportunity to design more effectively... WHAT!

Yeah, I know I look like I'm in my late 30's. I'm 50! and Age discrimination still exists. I read ads that say "we are a young and new studio looking for designers" with pictures of 20 years old in their "About Us" section. "we enjoy hacky sack, laser tag, Fortnight, extreme HIIT, gaming, golfing, sky diving, and going to the pubs to mingle". Without saying it in w-o-r-d-s their culture sounds a bit discriminating. You mean you don't have a bible reading night, a coven of witches club or a pottery painting evening, or a seniors tour of Europe? Oh ok.

Yes, times took so long for the design field to change, that now I am scared I won't get the chance to do what I'm so passionate about PROPERLY!

After I've gone through all this:

and this:

and THIS:

This is NOT what I want my career to look like:

it should look like this: