Link to slides
Link to Karmin's linkedin profile
Karmin grew up in Boise, Idaho. In high school she liked lots of subjects and enjoyed many activities including marching band.
She went to Grinnel College Iowa and studied Physics. She did an internship and got to work in a machine shop and made things. After her senior year in at college she still wasn't sure what she wanted to do so she decided to take some time off.
She joined AmeriCorps*VISTA. AmeriCorp is a government organization which takes on about 8000 volunteers every year to work on projects in the US. The volunteers commit to 1 year full time projects. Many are with low income communities around the country. Karmin's project brought her to Seattle to work in a computer lab to help increase the use of the computers in a residential area. She had to figure out how the computers worked and what they could be used for and she realized that to do this right she needed to talk with the residents in the area to find out what they wanted to do and how computers could help them.
After a year on this project she decided to enter her first paid career job as a software developer. Her job was to write automated tools for testing. She had to learn the coding tools and learned a language called labview. To build the tools she had to interview the users of the tool in the company and find out what their needs were and then figure out ways to build the tools for the users. She was in this job for about 7 years. What she learned during that time was her passion wasn't writing code.
She did some soul-searching to figure out what she really wanted to do. She came up three common themes:
-- People: She really liked learning how people think and what they need, and she loved helping people find what they needed to accomplish their goals.
-- Design: She loved being creative and thinking of ways to improve things. She liked to simplify and organize information and processes.
-- Science & Technology: She liked research and planning and running experiments. She liked looking at data and looking for patterns and solving problems.
She started to look for what type of position in a company she could have and that's when she learned about User Experience. User Experience is the intersection of Psychology, Technology and Design. She decided to go back to school and complete a Masters degree at the University of Washington in Information Management with a focus on User Experience (UX).
Link to Karmin's linkedin profile
Karmin grew up in Boise, Idaho. In high school she liked lots of subjects and enjoyed many activities including marching band.
She went to Grinnel College Iowa and studied Physics. She did an internship and got to work in a machine shop and made things. After her senior year in at college she still wasn't sure what she wanted to do so she decided to take some time off.
She joined AmeriCorps*VISTA. AmeriCorp is a government organization which takes on about 8000 volunteers every year to work on projects in the US. The volunteers commit to 1 year full time projects. Many are with low income communities around the country. Karmin's project brought her to Seattle to work in a computer lab to help increase the use of the computers in a residential area. She had to figure out how the computers worked and what they could be used for and she realized that to do this right she needed to talk with the residents in the area to find out what they wanted to do and how computers could help them.
After a year on this project she decided to enter her first paid career job as a software developer. Her job was to write automated tools for testing. She had to learn the coding tools and learned a language called labview. To build the tools she had to interview the users of the tool in the company and find out what their needs were and then figure out ways to build the tools for the users. She was in this job for about 7 years. What she learned during that time was her passion wasn't writing code.
She did some soul-searching to figure out what she really wanted to do. She came up three common themes:
-- People: She really liked learning how people think and what they need, and she loved helping people find what they needed to accomplish their goals.
-- Design: She loved being creative and thinking of ways to improve things. She liked to simplify and organize information and processes.
-- Science & Technology: She liked research and planning and running experiments. She liked looking at data and looking for patterns and solving problems.
She started to look for what type of position in a company she could have and that's when she learned about User Experience. User Experience is the intersection of Psychology, Technology and Design. She decided to go back to school and complete a Masters degree at the University of Washington in Information Management with a focus on User Experience (UX).
She completed an internship and had a UX job as a contractor before landing her job at Starbucks where she has the title Digital Experience Analyst. This job role is responsible for understanding customers (what they want, what they like, what they think of online/apps product and services, and understanding where customers have challenges with technology). To understand customers Karmin has to spend a lot of time working with customers (usability tests, interviewing customers, and learning what they click on (web analytics)). She then uses this understanding to work with the software developers and designers to create products, services and apps. As products are being developed it's important to get lots of feedback from customers.
To learn more about specific projects take a look at the slides - Karmin share's some examples of designs she's worked on. She brought in some example paper-prototypes for the attendees to take a look at. Paper prototypes are used to show to users how the product might be and to get feedback early in the process - its much easier and cheaper to make changes to pictures than to code.
To learn more about specific projects take a look at the slides - Karmin share's some examples of designs she's worked on. She brought in some example paper-prototypes for the attendees to take a look at. Paper prototypes are used to show to users how the product might be and to get feedback early in the process - its much easier and cheaper to make changes to pictures than to code.
The last slide of her presentation contains lots of resources for books, websites and different courses at the University of Washington.