My Passion for Inclusive Design
How I work: listen first.
The best design decisions are made before anyone opens a design tool. Early in my career I learned that the fastest way to build the wrong thing is to start building. So I don’t. I start by watching and listening. At Ivanti, that meant sitting down for more than 50 interviews with real users at their own conference, then working with my team to find the patterns hidden in what they told us. For Kinware, it meant understanding the emotional reality of divorced parents before designing a single screen. For a complex scheduling system, it meant learning a two-week process well enough to compress it to 30 minutes.
The techniques are the ordinary tools of the trade. Interviews. Affinity mapping. Journey work. Field research. What matters is not the method. It is the discipline of using it before you commit to a direction, so the thing you build is the thing people actually need.
Learning and Mentoring
Back when the world wide web was just getting started, a scruffy architecture student was trying to understand how he might make an impact in this world. I loved working on the main frame, designing the models for people and trees, and doing ok on the buildings, but I was always fascinated with the building blocks more than the final structure. At about the same time, the architectural firm I worked for went from being one of the strongest in the valley to experiencing some difficulty in the early 1990 recession. I started worrying about job stability and growth opportunities. I started looking into more of the computer side of the equation.
I got a job doing tech support for a large dial-up organization, and while I was working there, they asked if I would be interested in designing a page as a backdrop to their new chat interface. It never went anywhere, but that was my first experience understanding how individuals might want to interact with their computers. I knew that people did, but I hadn’t thought about it as a design opportunity until that moment. I eventually moved up in tech support until I found a job for a scheduling company called Primavera Systems. They do project management (they are now a part of Oracle), and while I was doing tech support for their lighter-weight scheduling package, they asked me if I wanted to try designing a wizard. Wizards were all the rage, and this was my first opportunity to break out of support into a position I felt would utilize some of my talents that tech support didn’t.
I did become a full-time designer at Primavera Systems and worked closely with some very talented designers. David Bishop was my first mentor of several, and I was off to the races. I will always be grateful for the time that I spent working there. I eventually became the designer for one of their web products, a product well ahead of its time, and started trying to understand how the web could change peoples’ lives. I took classes from designers like Edward Tufte, Jared Spool, and Jakob Nielson. I got involved with SIG-CHI and helped moderate their mailing list.
