Hello there... I'm
I'm a
product designer, software orchestrator, journalism survivor, translator, and #vanliferI have...
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...
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 journalism master's program at the University of Barcelona.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
