1) 30 x Sharpie fine point markers for collaborative design sessions, 2) Paper prototyping kit with Post-It notes, glue-sticks, crayons, yellow highlighters, scissors, sticky-tape, 3) Sketch notebook with mechanical pencil, 4) Red, green and blue sticky-dots, 5) Post-It notes, 6) more Post-It notes, 7) Prismacolor grayscale markers for sketching, 8) blue tape, 9) zip-case containing cultural probe materials, 10) even more Post-it notes, 11) zip-case containing sketching tools, 12) pocket notebook, 13) case containing Livescribe pen for field study notetaking, 14) roll of brown paper for journey mapping or sketchboarding or training.

Follow-up: Ben's Reading List

Jeff Gothelf

How did you get started in the field of "user experience"?

I graduated from university in 1995, the year that Mosaic came out. At school we were using Gopher and terminal based interfaces. There was email and an online world but there was nothing visual until Mosaic came out. I was intent on becoming a rock star (i.e. paid musician), actually. I noticed that some of the more successful bands had started building websites. I began to de-construct other bands’ websites to see how they’d built them. I taught myself HTML by removing chunks of the mark up and seeing what disappeared from the page.

I taught myself HTML by removing chunks of the mark up and seeing what disappeared from the page.

I started building websites for my band and for a couple of other small bands and businesses. I had crappy day jobs to pay the bills and I would practise my HTML and graphic design skills at night. In late 1999 I was tired of being a broke musician. During the first Dot-com boom I met the woman who would eventually become my wife and I figured it was time to get a proper job. At that point in time if you wanted to get a job in web all you had to essentially do was be able to spell “HTML”.

I got a job at a company called IXL, which became one of the biggest web services companies in the world. It was a terrific time to be employed because there was a tremendous opportunity to learn and grow—unfortunately at the client’s expense.

One day our boss came in with Morville & Rosenfeld’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and he said, “Who wants to be an IA?” All of us looked at each other and said, “What’s an IA?” I said, “I’ll read the book” and I took it home and I read it over the weekend and it made a lot of sense to me. It was about logic and organisation.

All of a sudden, instead of being the designer who got handed a bunch of specs to implement, I was being consulted about how we were going to organise the information.

All of a sudden, instead of being the designer who got handed a bunch of specs to implement, I was being consulted about how we were going to organise the information.

I’ve had jobs both in-house and in agencies that were related to UX—Customer Experience Analyst, UI designer and UX designer.