I graduated from the UK's Loughborough University of Technology in 1985 with a BA (Hons) in Creative Design (Technology). Of course, by definition, all design is creative. However, I think the three words in this title all say something important about the UX world. Surely, we are all creative and fascinated by technology. The good UX professionals I've met also have an excellent grounding in "design thinking". This is something re-emphasized by Jeff Gothelf in his excellent book "Lean UX" and includes things like--defining constraints, using structured methods for generating and evaluating options, and iterating designs. I also did a Certificate in Education in parallel to my degree (allowing me to teach in schools around the world), and sharing what I'd learned would become a key aspect of my career.

By chance, my personal tutor at Loughborough turned out to be a genius called John Branson. He not only taught me to program in BASIC and Assembly language, he also instilled in me that good design is elegant, efficient, and progresses from existing best practice. I often see UX designers focused on "progressing" our discipline through their designs, but find many have not first visited the existing best practice, nor are their designs elegance and efficient!

The latter parts of my degree led me into FORTRAN programming and Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems, and I ended up teaching my tutors about CAD systems. This led me to my first job demonstrating advanced Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) systems at DeltaCAM (now owned by Autodesk). I then spent a brief time selling these systems. I did my sales quota but sales wasn't my thing so I moved to the Data General Corporation. But I didn't regret my time in sales--soon after I joined Data General, I was privileged to work for Manfred Wittler, another genius who, as well as having a PhD in interstellar space travel, explained to me the value of "living with a sales quota".

I ended up doing a whole bunch of things at Data General and ended up migrating applications to use a new technology called a "Graphical User Interface" (GUI), that the heroes at Xerox PARC had invented a few years back, to make computers accessible to the "average person". This constituted my first brush with Human Computer Interaction (HCI)--I even read a few books on this weird idea of studying how users and IT systems get on with each other.

HCI didn't stick with me immediately and I spent the late 90s as a self-employed IT strategy and Business Process Consultant. I also did some lecturing in those areas at a few universities around the world. The consulting required me to specify and procure a fair few IT systems for my clients and, like many before me, I noticed these systems never ended up being what I'd envisaged or what my clients really wanted.

I set out to fix this! I picked up some relevant dev tools, such as Visual Basic and Lotus notes, and started modeling the interfaces I wanted to see. I'd show them to some of the users and iterated them until I thought I'd got what they needed. I even encouraged the users to do this for themselves, or do it with me. Then I went to the IT vendors with the designs and said things like "make this work" and "put a backend on this". Some did, and it all seemed to work out quite well. Others said "we don't work like that, where's the requirements document and specs?", and their systems generally didn't work out too well. Hum! I thought that there must be something in this way of working.

It was the year 2000 now and I realized that I'd stumbled on something much bigger than me and my work--apparently it was something called User Centered Design (UCD), and it turned out that my old university (Loughborough) were a global player in this stuff. So I went back there to do a Masters degree in "IT Human Factors". It was a full-time course, but I was still running my own consulting business as well as lecturing around the world. This meant that, for logistical reasons, I ended up having to convert to a Masters degree in "IT (Computing)".

I passed with distinction; coming top of my class, but the computer science still didn't excite me as much as the human factors stuff. Why? Well, I'll start answering that with a short anecdote--at Data General, I was working with my mentor, Bruce Zimmerman, on a complex technical design problem as part of a huge global project. It was freaking me out until Bruce said: "Don't worry Ritch, I'll get it working, you need to remember--these things are just computers! It's true that Bruce relaxed by integrating Einstein's special theory of relativity with the second law of thermodynamics, and that hacking operating system kernels was a part of his day job, so we need to put his comments in context. However, as complex as computer systems are, whenever you throw people into the mix, things tend to get even more complex, and I've always been attracted to complexity and anyone who tells you that UX design is simple, really doesn't understand UX design.

Anyway, I'd managed to pick up enough human factors stuff by then to get a senior job in a digital agency who said they did UCD. Like many agencies, both then and now, I didn't think they really did do UCD and soon left! I wanted to really explore UCD and ran off down all kinds of seemingly relevant paths, from psychodynamics and learning theory to AI and rapid prototyping. Of course, I also studied the HCI gods such as Brian Shackel, Ben Shneiderman, Don Norman and, of course, the "Usability Pope"--Jackob Nielsen. I'm always dismayed when I meet UX people who are not familiar with their seminal works, much of which is as relevant today as the day they wrote it.

Although I kept my hand in with some UX consulting work, I planted myself in the academic world because I wanted to do a PhD in how usability can be improved by explicitly giving users conceptual information about the system's structure. I found out that passing a PhD in HCI is a tricky. Some research argues that the pass rate is just 13%, partly because many examiners simply don't understand the HCI field well enough. I was saved here by choosing the great Harrold Thimbleby to lead my examination. He really does know what he's talking about when it comes to HCI, as well as a whole bunch of other things.