Armed with nothing more than Notepad, Internet Explorer, an inquiring mind, and the time between calls, I started to build a tool to make finding and utilizing the information that dwelled in the depths of the existing website. I showed it to managers who universally loved it, but never enough to rock the boat. Over the course of a couple of years, I was promoted out of the call center into a corporate training position, and then into corporate communications, where I was now in charge of adding onto and maintaining our existing website. The entire time I kept tinkering with my project, studying everything from PHP, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, and, most importantly, UI/UX principles and techniques.
Once again, I brought out my old project as the starting point for a major overhaul of our internal website. I eventually pitched the idea to my company’s C-Level management, who all universally loved it. I was promoted into a management training program and charged with getting my new design up-and-running. While in the program, I was offered a position as a software engineer within the company, and I jumped it. This would be my break, my chance to finally earn a true middle-class income and have some upward mobility.
Sadly, things didn’t work out in this position. While my company was eager to have me in the position to continue to work on my project, my manager would have none of it. I was put in charge of maintaining servers and back end processes surrounding submitting credit data to our banking partners, an interesting choice as I had no experience in infrastructure or the languages required to be truly successful. I was still able to work on my pet project, but it was made clear to me that it was a sideshow compared to my “real” work.
Once again, however, I found myself looking for problems without a solution and working independently to pitch a fix. One of the biggest issues we were facing was a lack of business intelligence when it came to what our representatives were actually talking about with customers who called in. Our VRU (the automated system that routes customers to representatives) was able to capture some information, but nobody had any idea if it was accurate.
In order to solve the problem, I built a PHP and MySQL based site that allowed our reps to quickly record the purpose of each call they received, something which required a lot of UI and UX work to ensure that the system was both intuitive, easy, and quick. We ended up capturing about 400,000 lines worth of data very quickly, which gave us an excellent dataset for analysis.
About this same time, the first version of our new site, based on my design, was finally released.
Between the easier-to-find information, a few other small tools I had built to increase efficiency, and more efficient call handling due to analysis on the business intelligence project I helmed, my company was able to shave around 30 seconds off of each call. In the call center industry, such a leap is unheard of. If you find a way to save 4 seconds off each call, it’s a huge win. It’s hard to put a number on how much money this saved us, but our best estimates were somewhere between $1 million and $7 million within the first year alone, with compounding returns over the coming years.
At the time, I was being paid less than half of the salary of the average software engineer. When I asked for a raise, the answer was a very firm “it’s not in the budget.” I knew it was time to go.
And so I jumped ship, finding work very quickly as permanent contractor to a company that made interactive digital signage. If you’ve ever stayed at a hotel and used a touchscreen sign to find a restaurant nearby, or gotten directions to a conference from a touchscreen, or looked at an airport monitor to find your flight gate, chances are you’ve used one of their products. I was immediately put in charge of the design (both UI and UX) of these signs for major corporations, as well as training our partners on how to use our proprietary software. Huge hotel chains, international humanitarian organizations, hospitals, universities, sports teams, airports, ski resorts. You name it, and I probably developed a sign for it.
A couple of years passed. I was promoted to a team lead and senior sign developer. My job also changed from pure design and development to traveling the country and running workshop for these large corporations. In the span of 3-5 days, we’d design a sign, develop it, and implement it on their systems, all the while training them how to use the software along the way.
While I absolutely loved what I was doing, I couldn’t continue doing it for very long. I had a team I was supposedly managing that I really didn’t know, family that missed me, and a peer group I never saw. I’d be home long enough on the weekends to kiss my wife, do my laundry, re-pack, and leave again. 2 years in, despite my increased responsibilities and capabilities, I never had a raise. I gave my notice, and once again began looking for a new gig.
My first idea was to look for work as a web developer. With a skill set that included, at this point, Agile methodologies, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL, PHP, jQuery, XML, backend systems and support, and a host of other useful software programs, I didn’t think it’d be difficult. I put my resume out on job sites, and the calls came in from recruiters.
To my surprise, I was most often contacted about UI/UX jobs. At first I wrote off the idea. In my mind, I was a developer. My code solved problems, dang it. I wasn’t going to give that up.
The more calls that came in for UI/UX jobs, however, the more I began to look into it as a career choice. I was shocked to find out that average salary for a UX Engineer was actually better than it was for a software engineer. As I read more about how companies were leveraging UX to make the web a better place, the more in love with the concept I became.
I also quickly realized that my life had set me up well to be a pretty dang solid UX engineer. My writing career gave me imagination and empathy. My call center career gave me interpersonal skills beyond compare as well as the ability to spot issues and find UX-centric solutions. My digital signage career gave me an amazing amount of UX practice on hundreds of projects with world-class companies.
I tinkered with my resume a bit, and put out a UX-based version. In a matter of days, I had interviews with multiple companies. Within a couple of weeks, I was hired on with a company that provides services to investment advisors.
I’ve been working here for only a few months, but I couldn’t imagine a better job. I love what I do every day, my coworkers are amazing, talented people, my company treats its employees amazingly well, and I’m in charge of the UX for the organization’s main product.
What do I love about the job? Every day brings something new. I’m facing problems that I never knew existed. I’m learning a lot about presenting tabular data in an easily consumable format. I get to do a lot of fun UX stuff like heat mapping, scripted UX testing, user research, whiteboarding, sketching, and researching web design trends.
In some ways, I’m still very new to the world of UX. In others, I’ve been at it for years. I’m tremendously excited to to learn more for myself and to help others along the way. I pride myself on being a great teacher and patient mentor whenever possible. My past experiences with terrible management have taught me what not to do, and I’ve promised myself to pass down my knowledge to anyone who asks for it. By no means do I know everything (not even close), but I love to share my expertise when I can.
At the same time, I still have a lot of questions of my own.
For now, my goal is to get as much “education” in the world as I can. I’m blessed to work for a great, patient, and empowering employer who’s learning as much about UX as I am right now. Each day I try to learn something new I can implement in my team.
One more thing…
I think it’s worth noting that while moving out of state to chase a girl I knew for only a handful of months was the best terrible mistake I’ve ever made. We’ve been married almost two years now, bought our first house at the end of last year, and plan on starting a family soon.
Sometimes stories have a happy ending. While my story is nowhere near it’s conclusion, it’s nice to know that in the middle of the book our protagonist is doing quite nicely, and has learned never take his blessings for granted.