"UX the Long Way Round"
by Ken Beatson
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
User Experience Design (UX) is a much younger profession than its practitioners. We’ve almost all migrated here from other professional “lands”, bringing our own unique histories and perspectives. I came here from fairly nearby places; I was a database developer, web developer, designer and web project manager. Others came from slightly further away: product designers, graphic designers, librarians, marketers and many other interesting starting points. So here’s the story of my journey to UX, together with some of the things I picked up along the way.
Love at First Sight: I was instantly addicted to the web. Love at first sight. It was late 1996, about halfway through second semester, just after morning tea on a Saturday. I could still smell the “new” in the University of Tasmania’s shiny, modern North West Study Centre, which felt like a brave new world of academic prosperity brought to the declining small industrial city of Burnie, Tasmania, Australia. Tasmania, for those of you who are American, is that little triangle-shaped island at the bottom of the Australian continent. It’s not that I am picking on Americans or taking sides with those unkind people who regard you as geographically challenged. I just appreciate that you’re surrounded by a heck of a lot more of your own country than other nationalities and so it’s harder to get out as often. ...
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