I began painting midway through college. I had a lot of time to kill in between classes, especially the ones I didn't attend. When I started, I couldn't muster more than a stick figure, so picking up a paintbrush and getting something other than a blob of paint on the floor was a huge stride.
Fast forward – I'd been working as a supply chain analyst for nearly two and a half years fresh out of school. That experience left me very bored–to a point where I cried Excel-cell-shaped tears. Painting became a creative outlet for me. It made me realize how much I love to make and build things.
It allows me to express myself in a new and different way. The slow-moving nature of painting gives me time to reflect, identify what ideas are most important to me, and find a way to visually make sense of those ideas. It’s a way for me to parse emotions and information, derive insights, and create something to communicate my perspective with other people. With painting, I jumped right in the deep end, trusted my intuition, figured out what needed to be done, and did it.
This mindset also drives my approach to UX design. After a brief stint as a front-end developer, I discovered UX and user research, and that was it for me. I was in love. With UX design, I’ve found something that energizes and inspires me the way painting does. It allows me to mesh both the creative and analytical sides of my brain to think through experiences, which is where I feel most comfortable. It affords me the opportunity to approach complex problems, identify patterns and themes to make sense of a mess, and create beautiful, intuitive products for the people that are going to be using them.
To be able to do this with a team of passionate colleagues is what gets me out of bed every morning. I truly believe the best way to successfully execute on a product vision throughout each stage of the product development cycle is to work with a tightly-knit group of designers, content strategists, product managers and technologists, who collaborate together every step of the way.
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