Like many other user experience designers out there, I started my career in the arts. In order to get into my arts college in the subject of music, I had to submit an audition CD recorded in our upper loft in Tokyo. This was before the days of simply messaging over a Spotify link or YouTube video. Once accepted, I flew to Seattle and auditioned once more live and in person. It wasn’t anything special per se. If I were a visual artist, I’d have a body of work to show. I’d simply turn in a bulky folder of pastel and charcoal drawings. If I were attempting to try out for a basketball team, I’d submit my team stats from previous years in high school sports and then play in front of curious scouts. They’d judge me based upon my performance right then and there. My audition would be built around my competence shown in the moment as well as my body of work in years prior. Across a large swath of careers exist the standard resume: a few blocks of text and that is supposed to be the big ticket. For many other professions, it’s the portfolio. Hire me as a producer and songwriter by sampling a few of the songs I had already composed and written. Look at my credits to see I had arranged the horns on this particular song. If I’m a photographer, look at my photographs. If I’m an interior designer, well, the same thing. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come to the conclusion that your work should speak for itself. Is it there? Then yes, you may assume I did it unless otherwise specified. We look up the credits after a movie to see who had directed it, acted in it, and so on. The examples are endless, but enter the strange career of UX. It’s the only career I’ve seen where we must convince the hiring gatekeepers of our process rather than the end result.

From Obscurity to Designing Experiences for Millions

There are plenty of horror stories through the pandemic that, though feeling like lifetimes past, happened just a handful of years ago. I had taken a giant leap of faith after finishing The 12 Rules for Life in a Microsoft cafeteria in Redmond, Washington. I was in one of two places on the Microsoft campus. Either in a giant mostly empty warehouse with a tiny desk comically placed by a wall, or else at another building sandwiched between the outdoor dumpsters, the humming of a server room, and surrounded by a chain linked fence; no heat or air conditioning. Just the wafts of waste every now and then being carried through the loading dock by a gentle breeze. To close my office, you just needed a padlock to slide the metal together and lock it. If you’ve seen the show Silicon Valley, it was where a former CEO was sentenced to as a form of punishment, except theirs was nicer.