Design Director (the largest part of my job is User Interface Design)

Are you self-employed?

No, I work for a startup.

What is your background? What types of degrees, skills, experiences are necessary for this field?

I have a degree in Psychology from Harvard University, which is where I started administering and designing websites. I was also a teaching fellow for several adult education computer classes, which taught me a lot about how confusing computer interfaces can be to the "outsider".

How did you get started in this field?

I've done web design since college. I was one of the first employees at this startup, which means that I got into everything design-related, trial-by-fire. I started in user interface design by yelling at the engineers that what they coded was hard to understand, and sketching out alternatives on whiteboards for them. Thankfully, we have now adopted a design-driven process where I build the front end, and the engineers build the back end.

What college (if any) courses have been most helpful for your career?

Surprisingly, my psychology major came in handy! I was fearing that I'd never use that knowledge in "the real world", but those courses gave me background in visual responses, color psychology, and decision-making theory -- all of which are essential to understanding human-computer interaction.

What are your specific responsibilities?

Everything design-related in the company goes through my approval. I plan the schedules for myself and my junior designer; we roughly split the work, which includes: designing websites, designing user interfaces for our web-based software platform, designing print collateral and business cards, creating logos and graphics for sales demos. I even picked the paint colors for our new office.

Describe a typical workday and workweek. What do you do during a typical day?

9:30am	check my e-mail and do a little frivolous web surfing
10:00am	managers meeting -- the principals, design, and engineering meet to discuss daily operations
10:30am	update to-do list, meet with my junior designer to review what we've each done the day before, and to divide up the work.
11:00am	based on the use-case models from our system analyst, create storyboard mockups for each possible screen of our software. Depending on complexity, a single mockup could take between 20 minutes and 6 hours.
1:00pm	lunch, usually eaten at my desk; then a short walk and errands run
1:45pm	someone will grab me to create an image or HTML template for a sales demo, which needs to be done *right now*
2:00pm	continue creating storyboard mockups
4:00pm	take a break and play The Sims. (I work for a gaming company; this is what we do!)
4:30pm	finish up storyboard mockups, update the status of to-do list
4:40pm	meet with my junior designer to discuss work status. critique each others' work and set a goal to get done by the next day.
5:00pm	keep going on mockups
6:30pm	check out the bugs that were assigned to me by the QA engineer. make fixes (normally creating new images, fixing HTML bugs)
6:45pm	answer questions forwarded to me by our client relations rep
7:00pm	unless we're in a time crunch, this is when I stop thinking about work. web surf, check e-mail one last time, and head for home.

In a workweek when we're in the middle of a product development cycle, my week might include a product planning meeting, a use-case analysis meeting, overseeing the creation of 60-100 mockups, a mockup review meeting, necessary revisions, and assigning the creation of HTML prototypes for most of those mockups.

In a non-development work cycle, my week would include fewer meetings and more "interruption" work. This week, for example, there were only 2 smallish projects on the design team schedule, yet we had a full week of bug fixing, answering client questions, updating the corporate website, advising the engineers on design changes, writing documentation, and creating demo imagery.

Name 5-7 job skills that are needed for your job.

Creativity, endurance, assertiveness, a good aesthetic, and common sense.

Are you in a team oriented position?

Yes. Every design project affects another part of the company, and the largest part of my job involves working with engineering to produce a good, usable product and meet deadline.

Do you have flextime? Vacation time? Work at home? Telecommute?

Hours are very flexible, which is a big perk. Aside from being in for morning meetings, people come and go if they want to run errands, work out, schedule doctor appointments, etc. Vacation time is generous, though I haven't taken much of it because my being out impacts everyone's productivity. I can answer e-mail, but being a designer means that most things I'm needed for require me to be right there, seeing for myself.

How many hours per week are expected or warranted for peak performance?

• During development cycles, 60 hours (11 hr weekdays, half-day over the weekend)
• Non-development cycles, 40-45 hours

Not any more. We work hard, but we've learned that no one is productive for 16 hours a day, every day. People work 8-10 hour days on average.

How much travel is involved with a job in your field?

none

Could you give me examples of projects that you are working on?

Right this second? I am designing storyboard mockups for a custom client order, while my junior designer is updating our product's online documentation.

Could you describe your work settings? Offices, machinery, resources etc.

Our office is one giant room, which used to be a martial arts dojo, but now has a lovely navy and pale yellow paint job and navy-print carpet. It's a huge room for 14 people, but some of that space is taken up by the office Dreamcast and Playstation 2 consoles. There are a lot of computers, whiteboards, corkboards, and peripherals sitting around. We are all, despite our varied job duties, a bunch of techie geeks.

What personal qualities do you think are necessary for someone to be successful in this occupation?

Being a user interface designer requires a certain degree of perfectionism, assertiveness, and logic. You need to care about the difference that 2 pixels makes, you need to convince others that the 2 pixel difference is important, and you need to understand why the 2 pixels make a difference so that the rest of the interface is consistent and makes sense to users.

What is the major challenge you face at work?

Balancing time with quality -- we're a startup, so we're always short on time and resources. Making things usable takes time, and it takes constant vigilance on my part to make sure that we're not cutting corners on the usability.

What aspects of your job do you find most rewarding (pros) ? Least rewarding? (cons)

I've been around since this company was just an idea tossed around via e-mail, which means that I've had a major influence on our direction, our processes, and our corporate culture. I have a huge amount of responsibility, opportunities to learn, and my job description is actively changing as I and the company change. I am an expert, where at a larger company I'd still be "paying my dues".

Are you confronted with difficult decisions or situations in your position?

Not particularly.

Do you have a lot of interaction with a certain occupation? I.E. media, engineers, etc.

Most of my collaboration is with engineering, although my job really entails interaction with every other part of the company -- sales, client relations, executive management, production.

What is the Female to Male Ratio in your position/field?

At this company, we have 3:11 women to men, which is remarkably balanced for a small startup. It's an *amazingly* balanced company considering that we're in the computer gaming industry. So many gaming companies, the only women they hire are "booth babes" for conferences.

I was the only woman in the beginning -- we got up to 10 employees before we hired a second.

Has the field changed since you first started your career?

I'm only 24; ask me in ten years. :)

Describe the changes taking place in your field. Project future trends?

I've only been in the full-time job market for 4 years, but even in that short a time, I'm seeing a much higher valuation of corporate designers. Particularly user interface designers. It's as though suddenly all these companies hit themselves on the forehead and said, "OHHHHHH... it's not enough for us to have technology, people need to be able to USE it too!"

Also, User Interface is getting some extra attention very recently because of the Palm Beach "butterfly ballot" in the recent election. All the UI geeks are going crazy over that.

Do you think women avoid technical careers? What do you think can be done to encourage girls to get more involved in the technology field?

I don't think that women deliberately avoid technical careers so much as they don't really recognize them as an option. I certainly wouldn't have predicted myself in a technical field, ten years ago. There is still this perception that technology is somehow separate from the rest of life, and I think women don't really see themselves in that bubble. But my job relies as much on understanding people as understanding code and algorithms.

Technology is already becoming more approachable, which will help. But I think the main thing that will help is awareness of what working in a technical field is really like; seeing women in these roles and hearing them talk about what they do and clicking with it.

Do you believe that women will be in more technical jobs in the future?

Of course. Technology is so much more mainstream now, that it's easy to dabble with it, become comfortable with it, and go with it.

Do you have any advice for women and girls that are interested in going into the field?

Learn how and when to be assertive. When you know you're right, be aggressive.