My interest in design really began with my upbringing. My mom is an interior designer and my dad is an engineer. It’s difficult not to be at least aware of design when you’ve known the phrase ‘form follows function’ since the time you were six years old. They were (and still are) really passionate DIYers. Watching my parents create things has really shaped how I think about design problems.
As I grew up, I became drawn to the idea of advocating for others - speaking up for someone who needed help. So when I went to college in Ohio, I was initially interested in becoming a lawyer, but found that the law didn’t really allow me to use my creativity or visual imagination. I found a home instead at Miami University’s Farmer School of Business and double majored in Entrepreneurship and Economics. I especially loved my entrepreneurship program and I learned that I could be as passionate advocating for a customer or end user as I could in a prospective legal client. Plus, entrepreneurship classes presented interesting questions about visual displays, branding, and the end-user experience which couldn’t be found in any courtroom. Whether studying how to start a business or how to retain a client’s interests, my favorite courses taught me how to really empathize with people, even if I had nothing in common with them.
After college, I found my first job in Madison, Wisconsin, and began working for Epic Systems as a software tester. While software testing wasn’t a career I’d had on my radar, Epic’s corporate values really resonated with me. Epic designed healthcare software, and their motto was ‘with the patient at the heart’. They really meant it. Epic trained me to advocate for the best end user experience possible, for both patients and healthcare professionals. Fortunately, I found software testing was right up my alley. It played to my strengths - attention to detail, communication, prioritization, and process improvement. This work also felt very meaningful to me, and scratched that advocacy itch that had made me want to be a lawyer.
I’m so grateful that I got my start in healthcare software because it made me realize how important UX and design can be. In the healthcare world there are obviously a lot of stressors for users, both patients and clinicians, and it takes a lot of empathy to understand them. While I don’t know how to cure any diseases, I really believe that at a minimum, the technology they use should not be contributing to the other stressful things they are faced with. That’s true for all industries, not just healthcare. I want people to be able to focus on the things that matter, and good design empowers them to do that. This realization is the spark that made me want to become a designer.
Regardless of what my job title is, at the end of the day, I’m an advocate. For a better process, a better product, a better experience.
- Hannah