My Path to UX

College days

I knew early on I wanted to be an advocate for the user. Every decision I made and every project I worked on was centered around how to interface better with programs to physical controls (UX is not just on a screen). Although when I went to undergrad, the term "user experience" did not exist. When I was taking undergraduate Computer Science courses at University I did what any other young person in CS would do, apply to an IT job. I was running all IT administrative tasks at the Vet school. I loved everything about listening to people’s problems and fixing them (still do in UX). Most the times I found an apparent gap in the programs they were using, and I was the bridge as the IT support. I knew if I developed these programs while listening to users, I could patch those obvious UX gaps from simple feedback from users! But I was out there fixing just one problem at a time. I knew I wanted to reach a broader audience. Thus started the next chapter of my life: how to leverage my CS skills into better user experiences.

Grad School

I was offered a position as a research assistant after my programming internship in a lab I regularly helped in IT at my university. I was an expert in Linux, and they needed some bioinformatics help - everything was based in Unix and Linux for bioinformatics. I thought it would be fun. And so began a part time job that turned into a PhD. Research is such an amazing process, and I became familiar with every nook and cranny of it. A theme that kept arising in my position at the time was that biologists are not computer programmers. Most actually abhor it. They went into biology to get away from computers, and like everything in our digitizing world, biology is well assimilated into tech. But it is the perfect problem for tech to solve, for the most part. The human aspect of the problem needs UX to find where the machine and the human can leverage each other. Thus I wanted to understand my subject better. What better way than becoming a biologist? (Ethnography)

Finding my niche

I began pipetting, isolating DNA, and spending a lot of time at the bench. My computationaly-trained brain bulked at some of the repetitive manual aspects (computers/robots would do this so much better), but I wore the lab coat proudly. I began writing grants, and publishing papers about possible UX-centric programs for biology. Academia is a little slow to pick these up, thus after my postdoc training was done, UXBio was born to help nudge along the process from the private sector - who knows - we could be on to something. Currently I am learning everything I can about maximizing UX and leading UX Design at Roche and help curing cancer through design. Still keeping my ties to helping human health, as it is my passion since day one to help people through better interfaces in our digitizing world.