Women’s Tech Radio - Episode 19
Astrophysicist to Designer | WTR 1
March 25, 2015
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DESCRIPTION: Caryn is a UI/UX Designer for Stateless Networks. Her background wasn’t in design or technology.
ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they are successful in technology careers.
ANGELA: All right Paige, I want to talk about credibility barriers and, I know, there’s quite a few of them, but he one that I want to spotlight for me is -- it actually happened on Tech Talk Today. Chris and I were talking about a Microsoft story and it was like, you know, an unbelievable one. I was just like, oh my gosh this is horrible. And internet trolls, they go on the YouTube video and they start talking about how I was just taking the stance of my husband, because how could I possibly have an opinion about Microsoft that’s my own. It was so infuriating, and I know that trolls shouldn’t really bother me, but it’s just an example of kind of why we do this show. You know, like we do technology too. We are allowed to have our opinions about product and I’m a Mac, you know, so, but I’ve worked on Windows, so it’s not like I don’t know it. So, anyway, do you have one?
PAIGE: Yeah, I totally understand. I have been -- my story is very similar to a lot of our guest. I’m not traditionally trained as a computer developer, but I have a lot of experience. I work on Windows, UNIX, Linux, Mac, whatever. But, being in a lot of those situations where it’s questioned, well you don’t have formal schooling for this, you must not know.
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: Or all that stuff. But I think for me, the credibility barrier, the biggest barrier for me has been internal. Especially right now in my career where I’m really transitioning into a team lead and real full developer roles and everything. I’m sitting there saying to myself, I don’t have the degree. I didn’t graduate from one of these fancy boot camps. I don’t have any of that. It’s that imposter syndrome is really -- that internal stuff is -- I’m used to it with the guys. You know, I’ve been -- I worked in a garage. I worked in construction. I don’t care. You can think whatever you want about my credibility. It’s what I think that matters, and right now I’m getting my own way. And I think that’s almost the worst.
ANGELA: Yep, totally understand.
PAIGE: And I think our guest today would agree with some of that. She definitely has got a lot of confidence in what she’s doing and has a non-traditional path. Just hearing all that from her is super inspiring for me and I hope it for the audience too. So, today we were joined by Caryn. She is a UX Designer at Stateless Networks and she talks about becoming a UX designer and kind of that path for her, and what it’s like to work in a technical field as an awesome creative multi-talented individual.
ANGELA: Yep, and before we get into the interview, I want to mention that Women’s Tech Radio will be at Linux Fest Northwest at the end of April.
PAIGE: I’ll be there.
ANGELA: Yes, we are currently running a t-shirt campaign to fund flying some people in and also for us to be there. You can go to www.tspring.com/linux, because it is Linux Fest Northwest after all, but it should be really interesting. Any time we do these Linux fest we end up seeing so many of our shirts and so many supporters and fans, and we’d really like to see you there if you’re local. You know, a lot of our guest have been from Seattle, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we got to see some of those people. Go over to www.tspring.com/linux and support our venture to Linux Fest Northwest this year.
PAIGE: And we got started with our interview today by asking Caryn to kind of tell us about her role right now.
CARYN: What I’m doing right now is I’m working for a very small tech startup in Seattle called Stateless Networks. We’re working on some network administration tools, kind of trying to take (unintelligible) tools into use of the current generation.
PAIGE: So, what does a day in that look like for you? So, you’re doing something for network design. Does that mean you’re drawing wire diagrams for how people plug cat 5 cables together or what kind of stuff is that?
CARYN: Kind of. So, we’re working on -- if anybody who’s listening is familiar with any kind of network administration tool, they tend to look really super outdated, like from the Windows 3.1 era of graphic design, or they’re really text heavy. They require terminal windows open and stuff like that. What’ we’re trying to do is we’re trying to provide a more visual method of working with your network if you’re a network administrator -- or even if you’re not a network administrator. If you’re somebody who works at a company, you have to deal with the network at all, we want to make it more user friendly.
Stateless Networks is about eight people. There’s about six of us in Seattle and what we’re trying to do is make it much easier for people who are network administrators, or sometimes not even network administrators who have to work with a network, being able to do that. So, when you say that am I drawing wire diagrams of people plugging cat 5 cables in, that’s kind of what we’re doing. We’re actually trying to show you a visual diagram of your network and letting you interact with that visual diagram in way that has a nice user experience and is much easier to use in current batch of tools that are out there.
PAIGE: Yeah, I’ve had some experience with that. I came out of sound design and theatre and that was something that we had a lot of tools for was actually drawing these digital wire diagrams for how to wire a theatre together for sound.
CARYN: Oh nice.
PAIGE: But, when I moved over to computers there weren’t tools that made me do that. It was always a pain in the butt to actually try to put it together. It was very much, like you were saying, the terminal tools feel -- Web ‘90s is alive.
CARYN: Exactly. So, we’re trying to kind of take the tools out of that era and bring them up into modern web standards.
PAIGE: So how do you do that as a UX designer? Is that something -- are you in Photoshop all day long or how are you -- are you interacting directly with developers? What does that process look like?
CARYN: So, it’s a little bit of everything, which is why the job is so fun. Usually, what I’m doing is a good portion of my day is often spent in my sketchbook, because I like to lay a good solid foundation of sketching before I get into anything that involves Photoshop mockups. I sketch out ideas. I do story boarding via sketch work to kind of take a use case, you know, like hey I’m a network administrator and I want to search for the path from this node to this node or something like that. And what I’m going do to is, as the user experience designer I’m going to sketch out all the ideas I’ve got for displaying that information in a good clean way, and what kind of interactions are actually going to happen. Like, I need to decide is this person going to be doing a quarry in a search box, or are they going to be looking around their network and tapping on things to find info. Both options might be viable. And so, I start off with my sketch book and I sketch as much as I can. Just basically using sketching as a thinking process. And then I will take those sketches and usually coalesce them into something like a story board where I’ve got some good ideas that have fallen out of that sketch process. And I put them together to storyboard that demonstrates what I’m thinking might be the flow and interaction for this particular thing, this use case, I’m trying to demonstrate. And then once I’ve got that I’ll usually run those sketches by people. If they’re really rough and I’m not really sure if I’m correct in the direction I’m going in, because I’m not a network person, so I usually have to check with people who are the network people -- which is some of our engineers -- and I’ll usually run these sketches by them and say, hey does this seem like the right path? If you were working with a network would you do this? And then they’ll give me feedback on that. And I’ll (unintelligible) on those sketches if I need to. Or I might then go into Photoshop or illustrator and start actually doing mock ups or wire frames. And when I get to that stage I am usually working heavily in Photoshop or in illustrator or in Sketch sometimes. It really just depends on what it is I’m trying to do. I pick the tool that’s most appropriate for what I’m doing. I create some mockups that I can then string together into a really rudimentary prototype. I have a tool that I really like called Envision. I don’t have any affiliation with them, I just really like the tool. It’s a really great, simple prototyping tool where you take screens that you’ve mocked up and stream them together with hotspots to demonstrate flow and basic interactivity. So, I’ll do that in order to get a sense for whether or not tapping through these things or interacting with these things in a simple way actually makes sense. And then I’ll usually hand that off to some people and say, hey give this a try. I’ll give them a basic task and say, hey you’re trying to search for something or you want to get information about this particular thing that you’re looking at on the network. Give that a try and tell me what you think. So, it lets me get some feedback from people after I’ve built a really simple prototype.
ANGELA: Who is your customer, because I used to work in IT consulting and we’d have to diagram networks all the time. Are you going for small business like IT consulting agencies, or are you going to big companies?
CARYN: We have a variety of customers we’re looking at, which I think our CEO wants to keep secret.
ANGELA: Oh, okay. Sure.
CARYN: So, I can’t talk too much about that.
ANGELA: Okay, that’s fine.
CARYN: But, yeah, we have a variety of people from big and -- mostly people who have large scale networks.
ANGELA: Okay.
PAIGE: So, especially with the fact that you’re talking about starting on paper with sketching, I’m guessing that you may have some background that’s non-technical. How did you end up in such a highly technical field as designing a product for network administrators from someone who sounds like you have some sort of other background?
CARYN: It’s really funny, I don’t have a background at all related to design or anything. I actually started my adult life out as an astrophysicist, which has nothing to do with network administration or design.
PAIGE: Wow, that’s out of left field.
ANGELA: Yeah.
CARYN: Yeah, it’s completely out of left field. Yeah, I just had always been interested in design and I had a variety of hobbies outside of what I was going as an astrophysicist student. I was doing astrophysics research and going on to get my PhD and I actually got heavily involved in the video game industry. I was doing some writing and some graphic design for them when I got offered a job to basically run websites for this company called Game Spy, and to run their biggest website which was Planet Quake, for the game Quake back in the ‘90s, which I played a lot of. I was a huge addict. At the same time as I got this job offer, it was really weird, the funding for our research ran out. There was a mass exodus of professors from the university I was at. It was as if the universe was saying, you just need to go take this job for a while. I ended up working for Game Spy for a couple years and started out running Planet Quake, then became their action genre network producer. So, I was working with developers and writers on providing content and updates for a lot of their game focused websites. Gradually that transitioned into a career where I worked directly in the game development industry for Activision as a publisher, and then Raven Software as an actual developer where I transitioned from doing things like graphic design, which had been a hobby of mine, into user interface design where I worked on Quake 4. That was the first game I did UI design for. And from there -- it’s been about ten year since then. I had -- just until a few months ago when I joined Stateless, I had actually been user interface and user experience designer for video games. So, I had worked on Quake 4 and a bunch of other titles. And then I gradually moved into mobile free to play games. I was just working at Z2 up until last year when I got contacted by Stateless. So, really my background is completely nowhere related to design and technical stuff. Doing network administration you would think, oh you should probably have a background in networking before you do this, but in actuality the CEO of our company actually was really interested in having people who came from the world of gaming to do what we’re doing. I actually work with two other people I used to work with in the gaming industry at this company. And it’s our gaming experience that makes us valuable to the company, because the way we’re sort of approaching the user experience of interacting with your network is a lot like interacting with user interfaces in games and large scale multi-player networks.
PAIGE: I think, in any line of work, the closer that we can get it to feel like play the better off we are.
ANGELA: Definitely.
CARYN: Exactly. That’s part of our goal. The user experience should be enjoyable. It should be something that feels rewarding to do rather than tedious.
PAIGE: So that’s a pretty crazy background story. Do you feel like there were points in there where you were really struggling because you have kind of -- especially compare to a lot of people who are in these fields -- like a non-traditional ting? I think, I guess, gaming -- could you speak to this, because I only have friends who are in the gaming industry, is there a typical path in the gaming industry or did you actually feel at home because there’s no typical path? Nobody goes to school and gets their PhD in gaming.
CARYN: That’s a really interesting question. There’s a little bit of both. In some sense, you’re absolutely correct, there has never been a traditional path in gaming. Most everyone I worked with came to it from really out of the blue fields. The thing is, as a user interface designer there is almost an established way to get there, and I did not follow it. So, in some sense, within my field I was the outlier. My husband, for instance, was also a UI designer for a while. We actually worked at a couple of the same companies, and he does come from a traditional background of illustration and graphic design. He went to school for graphic design. Most people who get into UI design in games come from a graphic design background or some kind of web design background, and I didn’t. I was self-taught. So, I did have a lot of that self-consciousness about having done this as a hobby and learning and teaching myself along the way. And as a result I kind of have a -- my personality is the type that when I become drawn to something and I really want to learn it, I’ll just dive into it and think oh I don’t know nearly enough about this as I should. And so I’ll really dive into it to try to make up for those deficiencies. And so, I just kind of threw myself into learning everything I could about proper UI design and absorbing everything I could from the people around me that I admired who were doing it and were doing good graphic design. And that’s kind of how -- that was my -- that was the way I learned.
PAIGE: What do you think was the most valuable part of the process for you? Was it a certain type of school or books or mentors? What about it made the journey possible for you?
CARYN: I think what made the journey possible for me was when I started actually branching -- when I was in the game industry and I started looking outside of the game industry for inspiration. That was really the moment where my career as a user experience designer took off. Because, up until then I was called pretty much a UI designer, and the game industry kind of has this -- everybody in the game industry has a different definition for what you do as a UI designer. Sometimes they’ll call you a UI artist. Sometimes they’ll call you a UI designer. And I was a hybrid of technical and art. I am actually mostly a technical person. I like to do scripting and programming whenever I can. My actual artistic level of my skill is kind of low. So, a lot of times I would get hired by companies who are looking for this sort of weird unicorn person who could do both technical stuff and art stuff. If you paired me up with a really good artist then we made a really good UI team. The problem with this is that there wasn’t much for me -- it was hard for me to learn from other people, because I was often the only UI designer at the companies that I worked at. And for me I really love being surrounded by people who are better than me at what I do, because I really like learning from other people. I have such a hard time finding myself in that position. I realized that every time a company would talk to me about what I did, and I described it to them, they’d say you’re like a UI artist, but you also do programming and design? I’m like, kind of, yeah. And when I looked outside of the industry at the way -- say the web industry or people who make mobile apps do things, there was this field I had never heard of before called user experience designer. And when I read about it I was like, oh my God that’s what I do. I didn’t realize it. I’m not really a UI artist, I’m actually a UX designer. And when I did that I realized that there were a host of techniques and all these different methodologies that people outside of games were using to improve their interfaces, and I thought I’m going to do that, because I didn’t really have a formalized process. I just had sort of a hodgepodge process that I developed over time. And when I started researching what it is that user experience designers did outside of the game industry, I brought those techniques into what I was doing and it just immeasurably improved the way the people were perceiving the interfaces I was working on, getting date, making them better. So, that’s where I think things really jumped for me.
ANGELA: That’s great. Now, I was on your Twitter page and it appears that you might have a knitting app.
CARYN: Oh, I’m actually working -- I don’t have an app yet. It’s a thing that I’m kind of working on. I don’t have much free time right now. I have a three year old and also another kid on the way in a month, so.
ANGELA: Oh wow.
CARYN: So, you know, in my prodigious spare time I’m trying to kind of use this concept of a knitting app to -- almost to just kind of improve my UX design skills outside of what I do. As a knitter, I’ve been a long time knitter for over 20 years, and I spin my own yarn as well. It seems like a lot of the knitting apps that are out there, I’ve looked at them I thought, you know they could be better. And so, I thought well I’m a user experience designer. I should use my skills to try and make one and see -- because I really do love to get into actual app design and actually creating my own apps, so it was a chance to try and do that. So, I started basically using my own UX methodologies to try and build one. And I’m at the point where I need to actually prototype a paper prototype of it with a large knitting group. So, I need to go find one and take a prototype and have them test it.
ANGELA: Very cool. Have you joined Meetup by chance?
CARYN: I have, and I just haven’t had a chance to -- there’s a lot of knitting groups on there, and I just haven’t had a chance to get myself together, get all the stuff I need together, figure out what the best test is, and then find the group that will let me come and spring it on them.
ANGELA: Right. Right.
PAIGE: Are you going to continue to blog about the process?
CARYN: Absolutely, yeah, I think it’s a really good thing to blog about, because a lot of people ask me what are these processes that you use? And so, doing my blog articles about it is I think a really great way to get that out there.
PAIGE: So, if the listeners want to check it out, it is on Caryn’s website and we’ll have a link for that in the show notes.
ANGELA: Yep.
PAIGE: Caryn, this has been fantastic. I think your journey is really interesting and really awesome to hear. It’s great to talk to someone in gaming and I’d love to have you back at some point to talk more in depth about some of that experience, but we’re running long for today. So, just one final question, I just like to -- well, two questions, rapid fire. What tools are actually in your stack? Just kind of real quick. You’ve mentioned a whole bunch throughout the interview, but what do you use on a day-to-day basis?
CARYN: On a day-to-day basis I use my sketch pad, lots of markers and pens. I use Envision, www.envisionapp.com is the other tool, and Photoshop and Illustrator.
PAIGE: What gets you fired up about tech right now? What are you excited about that’s either coming down the pipe or that’s kind of keeping you up at night thinking about?
CARYN: VR. I got a chance to try out some virtual reality stuff recently, and it’s really exciting, and I really want to try it out some more.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to Women’s Tech Radio. You can see the show notes over at www.jupiterbroadcasting.com or you can email us, [email protected]
PAIGE: You can also find us on twitter @heywtr. Check us out on Tumblr at heywtr.tumblr.com. And also find us on iTunes, and if you have a moment, help support the show by leaving a review on iTunes. We’d really appreciate it. It helps us reach more women and get the word out about how awesome we can have it in technology.
Transcribed by Carrier Cotter - [email protected]