Ever since made more money in one night as a concert promoter than a whole month delivering pizzas, I’ve been an entrepreneur. That was back in High School. Looking back, I can’t believe I did some of the things I did but they were all valuable learning experiences.
The Electric Theater
I created St. George’s only and longest running music venue – The Electric Theater. I’ve put on hundreds of concerts and brought large national acts to a small rock-starved town. Here are some of the memorable shows: Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Metro Station, Neon Trees, The Toasters, The Format, Matt Kearney, Reel Big Fish, the Aquabats, Guttermouth, Rufio, Piabald, Calexico, John Lee Hooker Jr, Leon Russell, Saosin, Underoath, Dia Frampton, too many to remember.
Geritech
I started a tech-support company that focused on helping the elderly become computer literate… I thought I was being clever with the name Geritech – Mashing up geriatric with tech. I actually ended up offending the very people I was trying to provide a service to! I went door to door with my little name tag and toolkit. Wow.. what was I thinking. It actually turned out to be a great idea – I just wasn’t old enough to think outside the box yet. Geek Squad was launched a couple of years later and has had a lot of success.
Switch Clothing Exchange
I was drawing a lot of the younger kids to the downtown area so I snagged the building next door and started a clothing exchange company. Customers could bring in their old clothes and trade them in for cash or store credit. It was a really fun business.
The Identity Group
I started a creative agency that did web design and development, video production, audio production, and print design. I made a lot of websites and worked with a lot of clients over these years. These were the years when you just create a website or design that you were happy with and try to convince the client why your aesthetics were more valid than theirs. I got a lot of design and code hours under my belt and a lot of practice “selling my designs” to the client.
The Academy
I started a music school for kids in the back of the building next to the Electric Theater. This was another way that I tried to capture as much business that spilled over from the draw of the the Electric Theater. Students had a 30 minute one on one lesson and a 3 hour group lesson every week. They would study a certain artist or music era or style and perform on stage at the end of 3 months. I sold this business in 2009 and it is still teaching kids how to melt faces.
Whether it is audio engineering, or programming web apps, I’ve always loved technology. Throughout all my entrepreneurial adventures I was always implementing technology in one way or another. I grew to love the web and web technology. I mastered HTML, CSS, and Javascript while working at a company called vLender. Thats where I learned to love front-end development and creating web interfaces. I was also interested in servers and back-programming as well. When I started building websites for clients I managed Linux servers and learned php and Ruby on Rails. Lately I’ve been venturing into IOS and learning to code for iPhone Apps.
I’ve always had a passion for design. My grandmother was a great artist and got me into painting at a young age, but I wasn’t ever very motivated to create art for art’s sake. I kind of felt like it was a waste of time because it usually served no purpose. A lot of years went by and I liked a girl on the yearbook staff so I signed up for yearbook. I loved creating graphics and layout to communicate. I also loved graphics class in highschool and loved designing things that would be used for some purpose. This naturally evolved into webdesign. I gravitated toward the Bauhaus movement in design and adapted that to the web. I don’t like decoration just for decoration sake on the web. I feel like form should follow function.
Bringing it all together…
User Experience Design in the intersection of all of my skill sets. I love business strategy and want to help business owners achieve their goals. I work well with developers and engineers because I know how to speak their language and what the limitations of the technology are. I love design and want to create esthetically pleasing, usable, and delightfully simple interfaces.
But for me this is where the field of User Experience starts… When the product is in front of a customer. Did the design meet it’s intended purpose? Were our assumptions correct? What does the data show? What do the customers say?
For years web development was all about what WE wanted to build. Not about what the customer needed to solve their problem. This is an exiting time to be in the field, because we have more visibility than ever into how people are using products. We can utilize web analytics, social media, surveys, remote user testing and it has become very cost effective and easy to learn what people want and like. We’ve gotten really good at building stuff and as an industry we’re past the point of building stuff just to “achieve failure”. Businesses are tired of wasting money building things that people don’t want or need. The field of USER EXPERIENCE will allow us to fail quicker and cheaper and iterate on our ideas until we are successful in solving customers’ problems.
