How I Became a UX Designer

I am thankful that I did not know about UX design when I first started my career. The uncertainty of what I wanted to do forced me to continual educate myself and read non-stop in an effort to find where I belonged. The path, through academia, non-profits, and data science now allows me to sets myself apart from other UX designers.

When I was a child I wanted to be an artists. I tested my abilities with painting, singing, music composition, dancing, and stand-up. I even tried to become a world famous DJ, known as ‘DJ-CJ’! Although it didn’t look like I would become an professional artist, I gained the ability to speak confidently, create something from nothing, and most importantly, the willingness to try anything and collaborate with anyone.

With my dreams of being a professional artists squashed, I decided it was time to help others. I worked in neuroscience, got a Masters in Public Health, and worked as an analyst to reduce homelessness. These years working with research and data now allow me to perform research studies, analyze data, and concisely summarize results. The work was rewarding, but I needed a creative outlet in my work.

My life changed when I first saw someone present a data visualization made in Tableau. At that moment, I was certain that I could combine my passion for art and my expertise in data to become a professional data visualization developer. I immediately started spending my free time learning data visualization and making my work publicly available. 1 year later I was hired by a Fortune 500 company as a data visualizations specialist!

At that job I got to work with brilliant data scientists, individuals from multiple organizations, and with jobs titles ranging from interns to presidents. As my skills improved, I started teaching, did training sessions for teams across the world. I even got to dabble in multiple forms of UX by designing for other teams that were creating new products. Like many UX professionals, I quickly became obsessed. I took a plethora of classes on HTML, CSS, JavasScript, and Figma and also read a UX book a week.

I decided that I wanted to do UX design full time and I knew that one of the development groups my team worked with had no designers. I saw this as an opportunity for me. Despite not being on the team, I attended every team meeting they had, offered to design new features, and worked closely with the developers. Everyone on the team quickly began to assume that I was a new team member. After a few months of being an unofficial member of the team, the associate director called me up to let me know that I was the official UX Designer for Digital Products!

I am currently the lead UX designer for two teams of developers. I have designed multiple products from concept to production across all levels of fidelity with almost no oversight. Five of these products are available in multiple countries, three of them have also been translated to other languages.