Career Beginnings

As a music major I quickly realized that I needed to pivot into another industry if I wanted to make a decent living. Not that there's anything wrong with a music career, but the industry is known to take people in and spit them out. I chose to keep music as a passion and have no regrets studying it and it's business. Besides, without learning about computers through digital music software like Pro Tools, I would not have ended up with a great career.

After speaking with my college advisor, and mentioning my interest in the digital world, he suggested I help design and build Northeastern University's very first online course as a supplement to his Beethoven 101 class. I began furiously learning how to code in HTML (I do not miss tables!) and using photoshop. He then agreed to let me re-design the music major's home page.

Growth

These years were spent working various freelance jobs and building my skill set. This is where I started trying to understand back end languages such as PHP and SQL etc. Although I don't consider my self a good dev, these years helped me build a solid foundation in understanding how everything works, what the limitations are, and how to break them!

I also spent a lot of time making really bad user experiences and designs. Flash and actionscripting were the culprits here. Too much freedom in designing web interfaces is a bad thing for a young designer. Just because something can spin or move, it doesn't mean that it is good for the user. Through lots of experimentation, training and time, I learned how NOT to design.

The Startup Years

I got recruited my a former manager to go work at Eons, a social networking site for boomers, spearheaded by Jeff Taylor, the monster.com founder. I joined up a a few months after their series A funding and worked there for almost three years and another round of funding for a total of 32 million.

I learned A TON there. I had my hands in lots of areas, learning about usability, user research, user testing, project management and more all while growing my skills as a front end developer and designer. My design skills couldn't help but get better after I started watching people use the interfaces I was involved in. From here on out, empathy in design became my passion.

LimeWire

I moved to NY from Boston and got a job at LimeWire, the peer to peer connecting software company. I got there at an interesting time as they were in the middle of a law suit for music copyright infringement, but also in a heavy growth mode as they tried to get from under the lawsuit and grow in a major player in the music industry.

Amongst other things, I helped plan and design a music service, built from the ground up, to compete with the likes of iTunes, spotify & rdio. At the time though, iTunes was a the only player. With a starting team of 10 or so people we forged ahead and researched, planned, designed the future product. We then re-configured our work force into an agile environment, working with about 40-50 devs, split into teams 7-8 with the UX's playing dual role of project management also.

I'm proud to say that in less than one years time we had a MVP working 1.0 version, with another 10 so versions already in the plans. In that year, my experience and skills grew by leaps and bounds. Here I learned how incredibly important it is to be clear in how you present and communicate designs to developers. The creation process is hard, and as designers, we can not assume that developers can read our minds. And on the flip side, as designers, its our job to read the stakeholders minds by knowing the right questions to ask.

Freelancing

After LimeWire got shut down and a bit of traveling, I decided to get back into freelancing. I've been lucky in that I got to work on some really interesting projects. I was able to bring my experience and skills to various digital agencies to help create some compelling experiences. My past work in user testing that helped me become a more intuitive designer was a great asset to these agencies. The reason being that in digital agencies things move faster than when you work on a sole product. There's always something new coming, a new pitch developing, and in the end, there are budgets, so the first thing that goes out the window is user testing. My time at agencies has allowed me to develop quick user testing methodologies. I ask random people to use an interface after its been prototyped. This is not a formal process and does not need to be. I ask anyone, from friends, family, co-workers, people walking by...anyone. Even just a couple people can help you see whats working and not working, and where you need to adjust.