👋

Welcome

Welcome!

to my site.

My name's

I'm

Jordan

England

Nelson

I'm a

I have...

•

technical chops

and a

background in

journalism

•

deep experience with early-stage startups

•

helped grow a team from 4 to 14 designers at a large fintech company

Some stories about design

Design stories

My background

Any designer of a certain age – who finished school before UX degrees were a thing – will have a unique story about how they got into design.

This is mine...

Languages
2005 - 2011
Spent most of my twenties in Europe.
Taught English and went back to grad school. Twice. For free.
(Thanks to European socialized education.)
Earned a graduate degree in philosophy (in French).
Attended Columbia University's Spanish-speaking satellite master's program in Barcelona.
Journalism
2011 - 2015
Journalism is about translating complex ideas into compelling stories with concise language.
It taught me how to empathize with readers – and later with software users.
My last beat was covering tech and aerospace for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group.
I also wrote about Burning Man, Tijuana's nightlife after drug violence scared all the Americans away, and how to plan a romantic getaway on a shoestring budget.
Engineering
2016 - 2018
After leaving journalism, I wanted to have a deeper understanding of this thing called "code".
I enrolled in a JavaScript bootcamp, built a goal tracking app for a special needs school, then worked at a SaaS product company as a frontend dev.
As a designer, engineering informs my systems thinking and helps me connect and communicate with the engineers on my team.

Some reflections

On language & code

I never identified as a technical person. I was a humanities guy – obsessed with French and Spanish. And then I realized JavaScript is just a language – a way to transmit ideas from one system to another.

Design as translation

Design, too, is a language. We listen and observe people. We try to interpret their needs, goals and behaviors. We translate what they say and do into what we think they mean and want, so that our response – our product – is relevant and helpful. 
Whether it’s distilling a complex topic into a short newspaper story or explaining a user's problem to a development team, a good translator groks the essence of the idea and transforms it into something the other side understands.

Journalism & UX

Both disciplines involve immersing oneself in new environments, seeking out pertinent information, and synthesizing complexity into something that is easy to understand.
UX designers are obsessed with users. Journalists with readers. Both require the ability to mentality put yourself in someone else's shoes.

Extra-curriculars

Currently reading 📚

The Coming Wave

–

Mustafa Suleyman

Come As You Are

–

Emily Nagoski

Books I've enjoyed recently 📚

Less

–

Andrew Sean Greer

The Mom Test

–

Rob Fitzpatrick

The Righteous Mind

–

Jonathan Haidt

The Story of the Human Body

–

Daniel Lieberman

The Way We Never Were

–

Stephanie Coontz

Marriage, A History

–

Stephanie Coontz

Crossroads

–

Jonathan Franzen

The Emerald Mile

–

Kevin Fedarko

Pure Invention

–

Matt Alt

Made in America

–

Bill Bryson

Collapse

–

Jared Diamond

The World Until Yesterday

–

Jared Diamond

Planet Funny

–

Ken Jennings

Podcasts I've binged 🎙️

Omnibus

On the Media

Savage Lovecast

Hard Fork

Everything by Gimlet Media

Freakonomics Radio

People I (Mostly) Admire

Tell Me Something I Don't Know!

Revisionist History

Nice White Parents

S-Town

This American Life (obviously)

Podcasts I've recently gotten into 🎙️

The Prof G Pod

Pivot

Search Engine

The Ezra Klein Show