I sneaked into the field before they put up all the signs (UXPin interview)

A little bit over a year ago the lovely folks at UXPin interviewed me for their embarrassingly named “A Gaze at the Stars” interview series. I’ve been meaning to mention it here ever since:

1. How did you get started in the User Experience Design field? And what would be your advice to newcomers to the field?

I sneaked into the field before they put up all the signs.

I came from publishing, having worked as an editor, author, agent, packager, and publisher. When the web came along, I at first viewed it simply as a great new form of publishing. Because I worked on tech books, I had already formed some opinions about how to improve user interfaces but until I hit the web I lacked any formal process or techniques or avenues for becoming involved in the making of software.

The web democratized all that and gave me a chance to teach myself what we now call information architecture and to build interfaces out of HTML (and later CSS and scripting languages, etc.).

read the rest at UXPin…