*Canux is the Canadian user experience workshop that is hosted by nForm.

My name is Niamh Redmond. I’m from Dublin, Ireland. On December 28th 2009, I am moving to Vancouver, Canada. At the end of 2008, I made a number of tough decisions. I decided to resign from my job, to reassess my career direction and to begin the process of applying for a Canadian visa. It wasn’t easy to do and I struggled with defining what path I wanted to take in my career and where I wanted to go in order to gain more experience. Each option that I considered kept coming back to a common theme – creating a great user experience.  

I have worked as a graphic designer, a usability analyst, a multimedia designer, a webmaster and an online project manager within various ICT, marketing and communications teams. I have been asked to make websites look “cool”, I have been requested to cut corners on projects in order to save time and money rather than to adhere to best practice standards. I have had people look quizzically at me when they ask me what it is that I do. I have thought to myself if only there were more people and more resources or if only colleagues and company stakeholders were more receptive to the importance of user experience. 

I know that I want to work in an environment in which I can utilise my skills and experience fully. I simplified my thinking and I reminded myself about why I got involved in this industry in the first place. The university modules that I most enjoyed involved research, writing, designing a product or service, solving a problem for a user, making things work better, telling a story, assessing a system in order to improve it and designing an interaction. Everything came back to creating an experience that was user-centered, user-friendly and simply, usable! 

I have determined to do that which I enjoy. I enjoy writing, researching, designing, making websites, playing games, reading, learning, taking photographs, experimenting with new technologies, making videos, watching films, listening to music, engaging with people, and thinking about how to create good experiences. As our world is filled with more devices and our lives are increasingly influenced through social networks, I am committed to designing experiences that are useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, credible and valuable. 

When I started my undergraduate degree in Multimedia in 2000, it was the first course of its kind offered in Ireland. I remember the excitement and enthusiasm that I felt. While gaining four years of mixed corporate in-house and freelance experience, I have come to see user experience as the key to the success of a product or service. The disconnect that can often exist between the people who offer a product and the people who actually use it can be reduced if, as experience design practitioners, we are given the opportunity to spread user-centered thinking. User experience can tie together people from different disciplines who care about good design. I care about good design and I realise that user experience isn’t one small aspect of a design project or an optional add-on. It is a basic requirement. It is about how people live and what they do. Those companies and organisations that are unwilling to recognise this fact and change, are being left behind.

- Niamh.

This post was written as an entry to the “Fly me to CanUX” workshop competition hosted by nForm. This years theme is “doing more with less” – “learning how to be a more effective UX practitioner and do better work even when you have less to do it.” More information about the workshop, which takes place from November 12-14, 2009 in Banff, Alberta can be found on the Canux website.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 at 10:13 pm and is filed under Art & Technology, Design, User Experience. You can keep updated on the conversation by subscribing to the comments feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.