About Me
A journey from videographer to UX designer.
With two parents who were both software engineers, I grew up learning to love computers. But, I always had a love for the camera as well. After graduating high school I pursued a career in videography which allowed me some incredible opportunities. However, once I discovered UX design, a field that combined my creative side and my love for technology, I was hooked.
UX Design
When I got into UX design I had a misconception that UX design was simply designing the UI. As I entered my UX design bootcamp, I quickly learned that was far from the truth. Early in my career, although I knew how important UX research was, I was far too interested in designing the UI to pay much attention to the research. While I designed some great looking UI, I would soon learn that just because a UI looks good, doesn't mean the right product was actually built.
It wasn't until I was leading the UX effort on WatchGuard's SASE product "FireCloud" that I really decided to put more emphasis on the research before the design. This product was far to important to the company to design something that just looked nice, and a lot of the research I had conducted on competitors showed me how complicated SASE products generally were to configure. My motto for FireCloud became "make the easiest SASE product in the market to setup and manage." After months of research and testing I discovered where user pain points were with other competitor products, their goals with our product, and exactly how we needed to design FireCloud to make it the easiest SASE product in the market to setup and manage. It was this specific project that made me evolve from "UI Designer" to a true UX Designer.
Today, I start every UX project with research and analysis before diving straight into a design. Research went from the phase of the UX process I was dreaded the most, to the most exciting and engaging phase of the UX process. My design process evolved from looking at requirements and drawing up a design, to conducting heavy user research, drawing up a design, and conducting user testing on that design until the usability is perfect. I now handoff my designs to stakeholders having full confidence that is the absolute best design for our users.
Beyond UX Design…
My wife jokes with me that there isn't a hobby I haven't picked up…and that might honestly be true. I live and breathe baseball (life long Dodger fan), but love sports in general. Our house is right at the foothills of the Cascades which allows less than an hour drive for snowboarding in the winter and off-roading/camping in my truck in the summer. I also love to travel and will never turn down a flight or roadtrip to pretty much anywhere in the world. There are about a thousand other niche things I love such as self-hosting servers, interior design, aviation, landscaping, and travel hacking that help me fill the rest of my free time.
