ABOUT

I’ve always liked to design things. Whether playing with Legos as a kid, sketching houses and floor plans as a teen, or nearly going to college for a degree in architecture, design was a common thread in my early life. So, naturally, I ended up with a twenty-year career in entertainment. Makes sense, right?

Except it does… As a writer, I designed stories. As a director, I designed how audiences experienced a film. As a producer, I designed the systems that got stories made.

That’s what initially attracted me to UX/UI design: the idea that I could use my storytelling and visual instincts to solve problems through design.

The main parallels between the creative storytelling process and the creative design process are strong. At the core of both, the narrative craft is the same. You start by empathizing with an audience (or user) who doesn’t know something yet and you design a way to bring them to a solution. To do that, you have to know who you’re telling the story to before you can decide how to tell it. Then you take them on a journey without them ever seeing the work that went into it.

What I didn’t anticipate was how much the other lessons from my entertainment career would turn out to be relevant too. When I thought about it more, I realized that presenting research and defending design decisions is similar to a story pitch meeting. Giving and receiving feedback, being time-disciplined to meet a deadline, managing several parts of a project at once, are all skills I honed trying to get a film made or get one more shot before the day ended. But each of these isn’t just a separate skill. Combined, they’re key elements of actually being able to take a product idea to completion.

Ultimately, both a film and a digital product are judged by the experience they create, not by how hard you worked to make them. Users only ever see the finished thing, not the decisions behind it, or the versions that ended up on the cutting room floor. If I’ve done my job well, the result feels obvious (for a good film or a good product) — like it couldn’t have been done any other way. That’s the user experience I’m after, whether I’m behind a camera or in front of a computer. I’m still designing, it’s just in a different medium now…