Unexpected Paths: How Different Backgrounds Led Us to UX

As user experience fields have matured, more and more practitioners are getting educated in UX before their first job. But for a lot of folks in our industry that isn’t the case—many design and research leaders got their start in a different field, and a lot of different backgrounds make up a good UX team.

On this panel, we discussed what each panelist did before they worked in UX and how it impacts their work today. Whether you’re new to the field or not, this panel will get you thinking about how your experiences outside of UX can influence your work for the better.

Panelists

Leigh Allen-Arrendondo
Leigh has a background in graphic design and film.

Lada Gorlenko
“My first professional job was in a prison. I researched personally changes in long-term imprisonment, and the work fed creation of tailored rehabilitation corses for inmates with different personality types. I consider it a perfect UX job; it was classic human-centered design a decade before I heard the HCD term for the first time.”

Andy Fitzgerald
“I drove an ambulance as an EMT for five years out of high school, then got a PhD in English Language and Literature. I shifted to UX/interaction design from there (because lucky), and have steadily pivoted more and more to focus on IA, user research, systems design, and web semantics. At first the PhD education taught me how to concentrate and learn, but now it's coming back around as a core asset in the work I'm doing now. (I suspect that ambulance experience helps, too.)”

Joyce Kakraiyil Paul
“Was an Anthropologist working on Human Physiology and Performance. Moved to Instructional Design and content before coming back to research and ethnography”

Dawn Wilson
“Started in social services research before eventually moving into tech/product research where the stakes weren’t quite as life and death.”

Tom Satwicz
“I started my career as an elementary school teacher. My experiences there led me to thinking about how technology, which often has great promise in education, ends up getting used in the real world. I then pursued a PhD in learning sciences which introduced me to HCI and eventually UX.”

Venue

• Convey UX, Seattle, WA | March 3, 2020