About
My story is a bit of a strange one. Of course in retrospect, it all makes sense. But the lived experience, the day to day stuff, still feels pretty strange.
When I was a kid, I never knew “what I wanted to be.” My wife Christina, from when she was 7 or 8 years old, knew she wanted to be a special education teacher. She went to school, studied, and is now a special education teacher—simple as that. I never could figure out what my thing was. I liked reading and I liked computers, but those two things didn't really connect. As it turns out, it’s because my thing wasn't a thing yet.
I've always been a pretty voracious reader, but I also had a fascination with computers. I remember vividly being 9 years old and figuring out how to connect to the internet. Crackles and pops from a modem had a certain enchanting quality, just as interesting and exciting as the first few chapters of a novel. This was 1994. I spent much of my free time working on and in the internet from then on.
Circa 2004, I developed my first website. Through this experience, I learned perseverance; it’s hard to describe the clunky monitors and confusing menus and general unfriendliness of the web at that time. I learned frustration first hand. I learned how to work through it, but maybe more importantly, I wondered if it had to be this way.
I graduated, took a job at a convention/travel company, and continued to work on my web and design skills. For the first year, I learned how to be a professional, working with others to keep projects on task. The second year, I started developing my own projects, starting initiatives, and creating assets for future use. Ultimately, I ended up spearheading more projects, helped gather requirements, designed front-ends, and worked with back-end developers to keep things on track.
But I felt a calling to learn more, to expand. I thought being a professor was the right place for me, so I went back to school, read way too many books and logged too many library hours, and graduated with my Masters. I then went onto work on my PhD, but after my coursework was done, I felt technology calling. I finished my comprehensive exams, started a dissertation prospectus, and started all over as a UX intern. Time would pass, a few jobs would come and go, and my dissertation would get finished.
While in graduate school, the subjects I studied weren’t themes or plot. I studied people and structures, both narrative and cultural. I studied how people use stuff, interact with things, and ultimately, why they start and stop. I studied the process around every day items--the thing behind the thing. I examined the reader’s experience, and now, the user's experience. How do people interpret information? Why are some things valued while others are not? How do we use stuff, and what does that stuff do to us in return?
I guess in a way I've always done this work. It just didn’t have a name when I was doing it. It never felt like I had a straight line or any sort of path, some mystical guiding light towards design. I’ve followed my interests, did what I thought was important, and I’ve worked on projects I care about. They all, curiously, seem to revolve around making things that make people’s lives better, more efficient.
This is what my academic work continues to explore, and this is what my career explores. Somehow, this user experience thing became both my intellectual thing and my career thing.
