I love December. Like any winter month, December is just as cold and cruel as the rest of them. It's got the festivities, but I've never been much for them. December is a time where I like to "soft launch" - whether it's practicing a new habit or venturing onto something new. I guess you could call it being proactive ahead of New Year's resolutions.
I'll take you back to December 2018 - I was all alone in a townhome watching someone else's cat and huddling in front of a space heater. It has been a year since I'd dropped out of the aerospace engineering program at UC San Diego - I was never cut out for that much math and physics. I'd instead opted for the cognitive science program, and that's where I had gotten my feet wet with HCI research and user-centered design.
I was a bit in a rage - not particularly because of the lack of proper heating, but rather because I'd still been internless. I was a victim of the "job experience paradox", and didn't really have unique territory to go off of.
Why couldn't I just create my own experience, instead of waiting for one to show up at my feet?
And so began my first-ever fake door test
With my isolated thoughts and copious amounts of wine, I'd gotten to work on creating a rage-fueled charter for my ambition. Idea after idea, I landed on something that looked like this:
You (reader) have probably seen that here I've not even completed my thoughts in describing pillars.
It's simply because I had no idea what I was doing at the time.
To this moment, the only opportunity I had sourced for was from a UX Librarian at the same library I was working at as an ITS technician. All she mentioned was that she needed UXR help to support web initiatives but didn't have the budget to provision a role for it. We never talked about creating an entire team to perform that groundwork. My only assumption was, if I could create the demand for aspiring UX professionals, that supply would come.
So I doubled down, and made the worst website I have ever created. You can check it out today, actually. Those colorwaves have never left my soul.
At the time I spoke to that same faculty at Geisel Library, I had about 10 fresh applications from folks across cognitive science. She wasn't surprised when I offered a fully-backed UX research and design team to support the library's efforts. In fact, her son who was also attending school at the time, had told her about a student-run UX consultancy that he had applied to. Safe to say, he would be part of the eventual team.
Corralling a team through the unknown
Kickoff day came around, sometime closer to spring after we sourced another client for project work - I was not only a mental wreck but also dreading if this would actually work, if people would stick with the projects, if the clients wouldn't be satisfied with the work.
But one step at a time.
I setup snacks I bought out of my pocket, got in front of a roundtable full of peers, and talked about problem spaces and UX approaches I had only read through and practiced ad minimum. But to my surprise, the group listened. They engaged the sponsors we brought into the room, asked them questions, and exchanged contacts.
As I worked on project planning and setting expecations with client sponsors, I had help from those who were most passionate about teaching and guiding junior designers to successful results. The most collaboration would occur in shared and cramped spaces, where our designers worked through user interview planning, combing through competitors, or sharing out findings from expert review or similar activity.
Soon enough, a day and time came where we were ready to summarize a 19-page long research findings document on Geisel Library's help functions and our recommendations for UX and service design at the library. And a shocker was summarizing this information in front of leaders and administrators at Geisel to loop them into the problems they hadn't been able to gather from patrons in the past.
The work speaks for itself.
Growing and gaining
By the time we had ended this first project, our team was a common name among the design community. We were represented in design community events, in our entrepreneurial lab. We'd even gotten to the point of being memed by other orgs, almost in a sort of rivalry.
It was truly a high I couldn't come down from - having started from a few beans and watching it grow into a gigantic stalk. I had a few trusted colleagues work with me on a growth strategy. We didn't really see where this was taking off and what it could become, aspiring that it could become a working business model for a consultancy.
We got more ambitious, starting a project with the City of San Diego. I remember the way I sourced this was outworldly, chasing a City staff member down to talk about our service offerings and arranging a time for me to come down to the city hall and outline a plan for their problem spaces.
The team we spun up for this project at the start of 2020 was even more powerful and more ambitious than the last - more designers, more funding for tooling, and even cross-org collaboration to speed us along to desired outcomes.
Infrastructure shutdowns for COVID impacted everyone on the team - most people went back home to be with family (including myself), and so interactions face-to-face was nonexistent. Luckily on our timeline we had just exited research findings and were beginning design ideation work, so WFH collaboration kept the team interconnected through tough times.
And in May, we called it wraps. It was another kickass story, about how 311 services were impacted at large by the City's constraints to the current technologies and how our recommendations could save the day.
Falling and flailing
The growth model that we had strived for so hard didn't come without its root issues. We weren't a business entity, and we were struggling to retain designers who were moving onto bigger and better things in their career. I knew I would have issues scaling opportunities into profitable means without a core team to support those operations.
I ultimately made the decision to hang my hat and focus on myself. I never completed my undergraduate at UCSD. I did a bootcamp instead with the downtime I had during COVID, only to learn that I already knew 95% of the learned material because, in fact, I had practiced it in realtime.
Fi never took off to be the consultancy I could have owned. Today I write while employed for a global consulting firm, but only as a drop in a very large pond.
I don't want above to say I'm unhappy where I am. Of course I'm grateful to be where I am now. But strip away the feelings of autonomy, leadership, and ownership, you'll feel a certain type of way.
Why reflect this hard, bro?
Some of the questions I've asked myself while continuing to write this piece include, "Why are you writing about this after 6 years? Why do you think people will care about it? Isn't some of these outcomes irrelevant anyways to what you do now? Especially when you were a student at that point in time? Does it even count?"
I think reflection is necessary in order to continue onto better things, especially written on record.
Probably what I can take from this is a couple of things. One, I need to adapt to rapid change, which myself personally I tend to struggle with more and more these days. Two, I need to trust myself, my knowledge and my capability to do more with a situation. And three, I need to reflect a lot more often. Those are all drivers for change, I think everyone experiences in no particular order sometime in their lives.
Would I create a new consultancy today with new people and new opportunities? Meh, probably not. But I know I would like to create something. I just need the right ambitions.
For now, I bid adieu. For those from Fi reading, I couldn't be more grateful for you. Send me a message, let's catchup like good old times.