How I have 15 years of UX experience at 23 years old
I’m sure that statement is causing some confusion, so I will clarify that no, I am not living in a parallel universe as some sort of Benjamin Button-esque human being. I also am not a child prodigy of UX design (if that’s even a thing).
Picture this; the year is 2006, and a small but inspired 8-year-old me is sitting in my third-grade classroom consumed by thoughts of tech. I was always a fanatic of the emerging tech world, which at the time was still focused on colorful and gimmick-laden feature phones and Palm Pilots. I was thinking about the latter.
My Aunt had just shown me hers a few days earlier, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to tap on all of it’s small little icons again for myself, and play it’s sunflower-spinning game. I even enjoyed meddling with its checkbook function despite having, well, the financial literacy (or rather lack thereof) of an 8-year-old.
I decided that if I couldn’t summon that PDA into my hand by magic or telekinesis, I would just have to make my own. So I did! It was our free reading and craft hour of the day, so I went and found some graph paper, drew out what must have been a very rudimentary and shaky Palm Pilot screen on it, and then cut out extra squares around it’s sides so that I could fold it up and tape it into a three-dimensional prism. I even rolled up another piece of paper to act as the “stylus,” and poked a hole in the top of my “Palm Pilot” to create a holding space for it.
I quickly realized that the single screen was not going to entertain me for very long. What good was staring at a bunch of icons without being able to tap on any of them? So I started to draw out other screens, the same size as the first, and I would tape them on top of the first and play pretend that I was actually using a real-life device.
I wanted to show off my creation to my friends and classmates, but they didn’t really find it interesting. I recall a general response of “so you made a paper cube? Why?” But I was so entertained with my paper cube, I was somehow immune to their indifferent reactions.
Sadly, I don’t have that paper Palm Pilot anymore. It must have been tossed out during a cleaning day sometime in the past decade-and-a-half. But it was far from my last paper-device creation. In fact, I went on to create over two hundred of them. Each one was based on a device I had seen in real life, from BlackBerries to Samsung feature phones to even tablets. I began to deviate from the real-life models to create my own imagined versions of the devices, too, under my own imagined brand name and image. Fortunately, I had the wisdom to start keeping and preserving these creations, and I still have them in a massive plastic tote bin in my closet today.
I quickly became obsessed with creating my own devices and screens. It gave me the freedom to change designs when I saw a problem with them, even when no manufacturer seemed to be solving them in the real world. It became a hobby that consumed the grand majority of my free time. You might wonder how people reacted to such a collection of devices, but I kept it hidden from almost everyone I knew. After all, I figured that to anyone else they were just “paper cubes.”
That’s because I thought of my paper phones as nothing more than a hobby. I didn’t really give any value to the work that I was doing. In reality, I was doing very complex engineering with paper, cardboard, and scotch tape. I was designing the devices and screens that I thought would be successful for someone in a very specific demographic. I committed hours and hours of my free time to keeping close tabs on the cell phone and smartphone market, always being sure to create a new phone of my own when I saw new features hit the spotlight at shows like CES and Mobile World Congress. I watched reviews of new phones on the YouTube channels of PhoneArena, PhoneScoop, Cnet, and others. It was an almost decade-long career of UX research and UI design. But being unaware of the existence of that field entirely, I minimized it down to “just a hobby.”
What I always focused on when I was designing my paper devices was how they felt, and how someone would want to use them. I would figure out how to design hinge assemblies using straws and other materials not because I cared about the engineering of them, but because I wanted the final product to feel like a real laptop would.
I went into each product design with a very specific user in mind. Take, for example, the very large Rev tablet, which had a diagonal screen measurement of nearly 17 inches, and was designed to be the ultimate productivity machine. In my conceptual world, it would have a massive 50 megapixel camera slapped on the back so that it could be used in film studios. It could also (again, in my imagination) switch seamlessly and instantly between Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and my own custom Zoom operating system. It could even run iOS and Android! Oh, and it had ports like you wouldn’t believe, all over its sides. “The ultimate tablet for any power user,” I wrote in my imaginary press release about it.
By contrast, I also designed two tablets to be the exact same shape and size, and to have nearly identical hardware. One, however, was called the Muzik Slate, and was a device dedicated to music enthusiasts that would run song composition software and allowed for a custom jingle to play on repeat, and be edited, right on its home screen. It also had a notes widget on the home screen for writing lyrics, and had quick shortcuts to the Music Store and Music Maker apps. By contrast, the other (called the Droid Slate) was all about being a performance Android tablet. It instead gave users many shortcuts to the Google Play store, a Google Search bar widget, and easy toggles for Wi-Fi and LTE connectivity. Unconsciously, I was doing very targeted and specific UX design with these two sibling tablets. All in my imagination, and made of paper, of course.
I made over two hundred of these paper devices, essentially occupying all my time outside of school with Scotch tape and graph paper (and smudged graphite all over the heels of my hands). Each one had its own intended audience and its own story. I spent hours and hours and hours pouring my heart and soul into them. And by the time I was packing up to go to college, I was about ready to leave them in the past, completely valueless outside of what I was still only calling a “hobby.”
I went off to college with the intent of becoming a Computer Science major, thinking that my obsession with the design and usability of tech would translate seamlessly into an engineering or coding-heavy job. But that idea quickly became undone as my coding classes became more and more conceptual, and brought me farther and farther away from the actual user-facing experience and design of the products I was supposedly developing for. I quickly changed gears and switched my major to Emerging Media, taking up graphic design and web coding projects that brought delight by reminding me of my experience-designing days of yore. Coding in HTML and CSS (along with JavaScript, PHP, and SQL) perhaps did the best to bring me back closer to my love of UX, which I still was unable to pin down and label as such.
It wasn’t until I came back home (after New York entered its first lockdown last March) and began rifling through my box of paper phones and tablets that I finally began to put the pieces together. My passion was about the experience of using a device. My designs were not focused on engineering, but on how a device would feel to use and interact with. User Experience Design. The design of how a product looks and feels to use. Product Design. It was then that my entire box of paper phones finally made sense, and I realized that 8 years of hard work had not just been a “hobby.” It was the groundwork for a future career in User Experience and Product Design that I should be proud of.
Now, as I wrap up my formal UX Design training at DesignLab’s UX Academy, the pieces are falling into place like never before. I am ecstatic to have finally found that my passion is a real and viable career path for me. In many ways, it feels like I’m coming home to the source of joy that I never truly allowed to flourish when I was younger. To see it all come together is rewarding beyond what I can capture in words.
Every now and then, I see a really impressive portfolio, or read some groundbreaking research about UX that makes me think, am I really cut out for this? Am I an imposter in this space? Am I actually good enough to be a Product Designer?
But then I simply remind myself that I already have 15 years (and counting) of UX experience under my belt. And yes, I am only 23.