Sometime in the early 90s, after twelve floppy disks scrounged from some obscure building on the edge of campus, I found it. Just as the bubble was forming... double click the big N… the internet… in all of its blue text, Gaudy, Las Vegas-like flashing gifs glory… will there ever be another Star Wars, when will the next Indiana Jones get made… I needed to know, let’s find out… YAHOO! I was hooked.

Ever since the first time I got mail, I knew I wanted to do something on the net. Unfortunlatey, I had no idea what that was at the time, but it was something to strive for...

A few years after graduating I was lucky enough to find myself working at small e-commerce shop where I seized an opportunity to teach myself Flash, HTML and CSS, designing a few small-features for the e-commerce site.

Even then, before any formal education, I had an inklinig that if users couldn't figure out how to use it, it was useless. A few years later I received a post card in the real mail from DePaul University outlining their Human-Computer Interaction masters program. Psychology + Design!? Sign me up!

In school I learned about User-Centered Design. Fundamentally, the key was to understand the people that are going to be using whatever it is you're designing through empathy...

Design your products by talking with users, gather information about their needs, build personas, map their journeys, test out ideas and translate what you've learned into the product.

Over the years I’ve had the great opportunity to work on mobile devices (feature phones and of the smart persuasion) before that was cool, desktop applications for Windows and Mac and even a brief foray with some large screen TV UI Design work. I’ve had the privilege of working with some excellent designers and developers.

I’m currently spending my day time managing and leading a team of excellent UX Designers building web applications for network device and security testing. In my off hours I dabble in some app designs of my own mind where I’m attempting to concept, design and develop the apps using Apple’s Swift development language via Xcode.

So far I couldn’t have asked for a better career choice. I can’t wait to see what’s next around the corner!