“How did you get into the field of user experience?” is a question we get all the time.

While the AnswerLab team members all share a passion for improving the digital world, we each have a different tale of what led us here. We’re sharing our stories in a new series of user experience expertise blog posts where the AnswerLab team reveals what feeds our curiosity and what led us to UX research.


In my case, I drew maps as a professional cartographer for over 10 years. My maps could show you the best places to get a drink in the Florida Keys, how to get around in St Petersburg, or where to catch a boat ferry in Bangkok. I traced coastlines from satellite images and tracked down 40-year-old government maps of small cities in Argentina. I once drew a map based on a sketch on a bar napkin still stained with beer – and it was a good map. My head is full of maps of places that I’ve never visited.

But as time went by, I began to get uneasy about how little attention we cartographers were paying towards the people who were using and reading our maps. When a map reader was confused by one of our maps, that person was often dismissed with “well, he just doesn’t understand maps”. One cartographer commented: “The map makes sense to me and if someone just bothered to spend a few minutes thinking about it, they’d figure it out too.”

We cartographers were trained professionals, so how could it be our fault if someone didn’t understand our maps?

I became more interested in how people were using maps and what parts they found confusing. I collected the funny stories that people would tell me about the mistakes that they had made when using a map to get around unfamiliar places – like when someone thought that a conference center was a mile away from where he was (rather than just around the corner) because he thought that a generic symbol represented the size of his hotel complex.

At that point I had never heard of user research, but I started wondering why we didn’t talk to our map readers when we were designing new map specs. We spent hours debating the details that we all passionately cared about – for example, icon design or the extent of a map’s coverage – but if you asked, we wouldn’t have been sure if it mattered to anyone else but us.

I can’t recall when I first heard about user research, but when I did I remember thinking: This is right. Why haven’t I heard about this before? Why aren’t we doing things like this?

So I went back to school and got a masters degree from the School of Information at UC Berkeley, where I focused on UX design and research. And now I’m at AnswerLab, where I work as a UX Researcher.

I don’t spend my day drawing maps anymore, but I still carry maps in my head of the paths that people take when navigating a website. I still collect stories, but they’re about technology and what works and what could be better. And now when someone asks, I can tell them whether or not those tiny little details matter to the actual users.