If you’re struggling to find your way into a UX job, then I think you’ll find that Doug Collins is an inspirational guy. Ever since he crossed my path on the UX Mastery forums I’ve been fascinated by his upbeat attitude, his pragmatic approach to problems, and his willingness to go out of his way to help others. Then I read his story: From Homeless to UX Engineer.
It is an exciting time to be transitioning into a career in UX, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy time. There isn’t a defined path and we see lots of our community members struggling to decide how their time and money can best be spent with the end goal of that first UX job.
Doug has been down this road and has struggled with adversity to get where he is today. He’s giving us the opportunity to learn from his experience, and for that we’re very fortunate.
The Details
- Where: Our dedicated ‘Ask Doug’ Slack channel.
- When: 4pm Tuesday 16 August PDT or 9am Wednesday 17 August AEST
(or find out what time that is for you)
Meet Doug Collins
Doug Collins has taken the long road to his current position as a UX Engineer for Trust Company of America. After years as an unsuccessful freelance journalist, Doug was forced to live out of his subcompact car for a little less than a year. During this time, Doug worked as a call center representative for Nordstrom during the day while independently studying web design, development, user experience, and user interaction by night.
Using this knowledge, he was eventually able to land jobs as a Software Engineer with Nordstrom, a contracted Interactive Designer and Team Lead working with a digital signage company, and his current UX Engineer role.
Doug specializes in streamlining existing inefficient systems to fit modern usability standards.
How to Ask Your Questions
If you can’t make the live session but have questions, we’d love to collect them ahead of time and we’ll ask Doug on your behalf. You can submit your questions here. We’ll publish the responses (along with the full transcript) in the days following the session.
How does Ask Me Anything work?
These sessions run for approximately an hour and best of all, they don’t cost a cent. We run them in our dedicated public Slack channel. That means that there is no audio or video, but a full transcript will be posted up on here in the days following the session.
