Just Showing Up

Being a designer is more of a way of life and not just my profession. To be innovative and creative, you have to always look at the humor and the ordinary details that no one else pays attention to. “Life is too important to be taken seriously.” For me, Oscar Wilde’s quote reflects the humor I always see in life and about myself.


I remember when I was first out of college; I put a bullet on my resume stating, “Ability to inspire creativity in others.” It’s funny how some things sound so good when they are in your head, but no one understood this and I couldn’t explain it back then. The older I get, I realize that Woody Allen’s quote “90% of life is just showing up” is also pretty true.

I have been a User Experience Professional for twenty years in Seattle, WA. I knew I always wanted to be a designer since I was a kid because I would redesign everything and it was very satisfying to take ideas and change them into something usable.

Making things usable is what I want to talk about. When you interact with very ordinary things say a door handle, a light switch, a subway ticket machine, an elevator or a cell phone you are developing a seemingly surface level relationship with these things but, in reality, it is your interaction with these things that shape your attitude or behavior on a sub-conscience level. These interactions fuel your motivation to use or to buy them. If a door handle or a light switch doesn’t behave like you think it should, then you get frustrated and try another alternative, maybe a window or a candle. But when it comes to a product, you have a choice and you would choose not to buy something that doesn’t work. This is what real people experience all the time with software, hardware or mobile devices and development teams are so perplexed why something fails. The concept is pretty basic and this is why UX professionals test with real users. Depending on the audience, they can have extreme feelings of failure with these tools, especially when they are forced to use them for their jobs, for example. We have to look at the details that no one else pays attention to about failed experiences and hopefully prevent them from happening for the users of our products.