Hello, I am Christopher. I work in User Experience Design and Digital Marketing, often in the financial world. Among other things, I enjoy the arts, design, taking photos, listening and attending live music, have an interest in technology, tea, and travel.
This site has several pages about my professional experiences, so please feel free to explore.
For more concrete experiences and success stories, please see my LinkedIn profile. It has far more than any version of my resume would. And I am proud of the recommendations I have received from my coworkers, managers, and clients through that social network.
I have a hard time bragging about myself. Ironic, since the field of Marketing is often lumped together with the field of Sales. As such, this site was very difficult for me to create. This specific page is here because I found myself telling this same story in each job interview I had, and over and over again to peers and friends.
I have always been creative. I picked up sketching and painting quickly. I never wanted to take music lessons, my brother did… until I surpassed him in lessons. This set me up to always have a side passion which counterbalanced my main study. By the time I was in college, I was pursuing a business degree while doing graphic design, Flash animation, and websites on the side to help pay my tuition. I focused in school in the traditional studies of marketing, business administration, research and analytics, and applied psychology.
When I first learned about Adobe Photoshop, I literally took out every book I could find in all of Illinois. I was a college freshman learning business, I was not a graphic design major, it was just a side passion for many years. Yet like music lessons earlier in life, I had an intense focus on this side interest of Photoshop. My college had a book sharing program, so I was able to request great study material from across the state. By the time I did take a class in college, the syllabus was too rudimentary – serving only as practicing what I already knew well.
Folks asked me over the years why I did not train in graphic design or computer programming. My answer has been the same since college. I could learn those skills myself, I find they come natural to me. Yet those would keep me in my shell – an introvert succeeding at a craft. However, the larger concepts of academia could be applied to a wider variety of fields, and being social and an effective communicator were skills I could not teach myself. Still, there was a new school at DePaul University called Human Computer Interaction (HCI) that I payed close attention to. Still, they required programming in C++, Java, and other languages that did not interest me.
I was fortunate to learn about web design before everything changed. In those early years of web design, Photoshop layouts became websites by slicing up the image into a table grid of HTML. We could create something visually appealing, with very little interactivity. Tools helped us add some interactivity and speed up the process. The code was horrendous, so many people learned coding just to fix mistakes the software editors would put into place. Then we learned better and better code to combat issues caused by Internet Explorer (or Netscape Navigator) not having the same interpretation of HTML. And as a contrast to that, text only editors were having a resurgence, as their code was more elegantly rendered – and aspects like usability and site architecture could be focused on. Then standards-compliant HTML and the amazing CSS came along - and everything changed. Only to be changed again when mobile devices came around.
After web design changed (due mainly to style sheets and standards compliant browsers, but also the mobile web), those same tools I had learned that excelled at creating Photoshop-to-HTML websites became the basis of a new rapid prototyping. This aided in the transition to user experience design for myself and the industry as a whole. I was already great with Adobe ImageReady and Macromedia Fireworks, and clients valued my business mindset applied to their need for websites.
For a couple years, I fooled myself into thinking I could keep “digital” out of my marketing career, being more of a generalist. Yet at every new role, I kept being drawn into digital marketing projects. And my creative skills kept putting a polish on my work that exceeded those around me with better knowledge but lesser creative talents. Eventually I caved in and embraced a more specialized role in digital marketing. However, I still try to wear many hats as often as possible.
For many years, I was frustrated to learn that professional clients would need to see their ideas fleshed out in a mockup before realizing they wanted a new direction. Those of us who think through design challenges can better visualize and synergize solutions like a puzzle in our heads. So I had learned a way to get clients to give buy-in without needing a full color mockup with all the detail and content. I had backed into the concept of wireframing and creating low-fidelity mockups. Little did I know that concept was one of the cornerstones of UX Design, and sparked my interest. It was the desire for efficiency - fewer revisions - that originally got me into UX. Not only in the design phase of a project, but I also saw that changes in the development phasee were expensive and time intensive. So the quicker we could come to the right answer, the better the budget and the user's experience.
Then in the spring of 2010, I attended South By Southwest Interactive conference (SXSWi) in Austin, Texas. There I learned what I was already doing in the professional world was the same as many other professionals - they were calling it wireframing. There I realized that my interest in applying market research, consumer behavior, cognative psychology, and gestalt principles to web design was a perfect background to what the new industry of User Experience Design was adopting. And there I learned that my PSD-to-HTML skills were helping web designers do actual testing with users. And there were interesting new tools allowing us to get feedback from actual users through online surveys, screen sharing, interviews and what was becoming known as usability testing. These concepts were not exactly new, as my company sold technology solutions for collaboration, telephony, and collaboration. This was simply a new way to apply those solutions to the design process.
While 2010 is when I changed my direction to speak to UX Design, the work I did leading up to this time was so similar, that I was clearly already doing the work. My unique education, the way I designed for the web, and my interest in digigal marketing all led up to this new emerging field of UX Design.