User Experience has always been a part of what I do.

I’ve always been driven by making and doing things that matter to people. As a composer, I not only want the listener to love what they hear, but the performers to feel understood as artists and craftspeople. As a competitive athlete, I don’t just care about getting the most out of myself, but about learning who my teammates are both on and off the field so that we can play better and achieve more together. And as a nonprofit administrator for over 12 years, I made a career out of not only keeping critical front-line services operating from behind the scenes, but of understanding their needs from the inside out and filling gaps they didn’t even know they had.

That passion for making all parts of a complex machine work together harmoniously is what I bring to UX design. Like a delicately balanced phrase, a perfectly coordinated pass of the ball, or a well-planned project, I believe that good design happens in small ways that can make big impacts.

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 See more of my journey into UX

In July 2021, I was honored to be featured by the Minnesota Technology Association (MnTech) as part of their non-traditional tech talent series. In the interview, I reflect on how my experience in other fields prepared me for success in UX, discuss the challenges of changing careers, and provide my advice to other mid-career professionals looking to break into the industry.

About the Photos

Doodling helps to put me in a creative mindset when tackling tough problems, This doodle is from the top margin of an agenda for a weekly construction team meeting that I was attending on a cold January morning. I spent a lot of Wednesdays in a trailer discussing details of a renovation project I was internally managing as the client representative. When you’re tasked with managing construction and never have before, you need all the creativity you can muster!

When writing music, the performers have to feel empowered to give their best to their part in order to deliver a powerful performance. In my original piece for two sopranos and piano titled “The Mirror,” I changed the passage pictured here from the text of the poem to a simple “ah” after one of the singers told me in rehearsal that she was struggling to annunciate the words clearly in such a high register. The result made the piece better both for her as a singer and for the listeners in the audience.

I am a proud member of the Twin Cities Robert Emmets camogie team. Camogie, and its fraternal twin hurling, are sports with ancient roots, native to Ireland and identified by UNESCO as practices of Intangible Cultural Heritage. This photo is of a collage commemorating our 2019 season, when we officially became one of the top non-Irish teams in the world by bringing home the cup at the GAA World Games and becoming the first primarily American-born team to compete at the senior level in North America.