My first job was a programmer, working with a team of colleagues to develop a database management system. In 1998 I accepted a job opportunity in the advertising/marketing industry and over several years moved up from a role of a junior AE to be the marketing team leader.

As an IT professional, I learned how to develop software and applications and as a marketing professional, I learned about product promotions, branding, and mass communication. However, I became increasingly interested in figuring out how to design good products and services, skills neither which my IT nor marketing experience provided answers for. I felt this was very important and tried to figure out the answers, until I realized UX is the domain I'm looking for. In the process I was inspired by the work of Adaptive Path and JJG, and books such as:

• Information Architecture by Peter Moville and Louis Rosenfeld
• Usability by Jakob Nielsen
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

I focused on three areas that helped me unlock the door to UX--information architecture, usability, and rapid prototyping. Evolving my knowledge and skills in these, helped me to build up the design knowledge and practice.

Today I'm a UX architect and evangelist leading a small UX consulting firm in Taiwan. Through the use of various qualitative and quantitative research methods, I gain insights into the motivations and issues of the users. Each time I interview users and listen to their stories, I learn a lot, and I find that interacting directly with users makes me feel good. After the research phase, I often build a prototype that helps test our ideas and assumptions, and finalize the design so that the product can be coded.

I think that curiosity is a very important trait and I also believe that you don't have to have an official job title, such as "UX designer", to do experience design work. You have to be curious and care about designing good product experiences.

The world is getting more complex than ever before, and I think that to be viable in the future it will be essential to possess a range of skills and knowledge in various domains. So I'm eager to learn new things, and work in a variety of different areas. In addition, it is important for me to be active in the design community, and so I have a very active role in establishing HPX, which is probably the largest community of training and support for junior designers or researchers. We hold over a hundred monthly events to discuss design, marketing, management, and so on, and share design experience with each other.

Richard's LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardtsai