SO, first things first! Tell me, what did you want to be when you were little?

The first thing I wanted to be was to be a primary teacher, just because my mom was a teacher. Then around 10 years old, I wanted to become a journalist. I was very curious, I really liked to write, and I really really liked to travel. So I got it in my head that I wanted to be a journalist just because of that.

That’s awesome! So, this begs the question, what the hell happened??

My maths and science scores were really high all the way throughout high school, so my dad talked me out of becoming a journalist. Or rather, he talked me out of studying journalism anyway. He was a computer engineer, he had originally studied maths, but then he became an analyst programmer. So he was like, okay, why don’t you study computer engineering, and then once you have finished that, you can then become a journalist who specialises in computers. And that’s why I chose to study computer engineering.

One of the really attractive things for me was the logical part of programming and problem solving. I remember all of those things came very naturally to me and it just all made sense. At the same time I remember that it became evident during uni that my communication skills were quite high. Later throughout my career, this is what helped me develop my empathy and my active listening skills.

And on top of it all, I think I had a kind of calling to listen to other people’s stories and write about them, to help communicate their stories. That’s how I always think about when we’re working on user requirements: “Okay, this could be something written as part of an article, or as part of a story for a newspaper”.

I think that’s how I ended up seeing myself as a journalist. Although now I probably will never be a real journalist. [giggles] I really love my career and I don’t see myself doing anything else apart from what I am and what I do. And even though I never went into journalism, I do see all those communication skills, empathy, active listening, research, curiosity: all of those coming through.

Can you talk me through your early jobs and how it all led you towards UX eventually? Were there aspects of these jobs that had to do with design at all?

Throughout my uni years I built up a little bit of commercial experience because I had been working as a promoter for different types of products. So I learned how to talk to people, how to be present in front of different people.

This role helped me train in these communication techniques by explaining technical issues to people who are non technical, and adapting our language that we were using at the office, to when we were at the clients office and explaining most of our offer software without getting too technical. So I remember that and that’s when I kind of realised, okay, yeah, I do like the programming part of it… but I really like the part of going in front of the client and presenting and introducing the product, and training people. At this place, we were doing what we would now call full stack, but I was more towards the front end development part.

My third job, which was in the UK already, was for a company called Lucid Products. They discovered I had this experience on the commercial side of things, and with providing training, so they had me pitch the product and so on, but after a while they also just went… “why don’t you go and find out what they actually want”. So now they wanted me to gather business requirements so we can create a better product for the client.

At this point I thought I was developing my career towards becoming a Business Analyst. The things that really made it click for me about becoming a BA was that most of the time the users were talking about their problems and my job was to figure out how to solve those problems.

It looks like it wasn’t very many steps from doing business analysis for Lucid Products until your first real UX job. What changed between Lucid, and then the next job where you were a web developer, and the next one, where your title was Prototyper? That’s quite an interesting progression.

At Lucid I was sent to the client all the time to figure out what was going on. In my head I was already rephrasing things as “Okay, what is the problem that they’re facing?” and I was already drawing the solution to their problem too. Instead of looking at it from the point of view of tech architecture, I was already looking at it at the level of user interactions, and in terms of how to create tools that would solve our customers’ problems. It was very easy for me to get out pen and paper and start throwing these ideas down with the client like “Is this more or less what you were thinking of? Oh, yeah. Okay.”

Then I would go back to the office, code up the front end, just JavaScript or using XML and nothing in the back end, then go back to them and say, okay, is this what you want? Is this the type of data that you needed?

I didn’t know at that time but I was doing co-creation, ideation and prototyping. In my mind I was just doing my job which was to find out what they want and solve their problems. But then that led to all this other stuff, and as a result, by the time we started building, it would almost never be things that the clients wouldn’t want. I loved that.

When did you put a name of “UX design” or any of those terms against what you were already doing? Because at this point, it sounds like you were doing the thing, this work that’s incredibly valuable work. And not even the company knows that you’re doing something that has a name.

Yeah, I wasn’t very aware of UX at that point, I didn’t even know that UX existed. I actually didn’t put a name to it until I went to Orange.

So how did you end up as a Prototyper at Orange, then?

One day I was explaining what I was doing to my friend Carlos, who was a director at Orange at the time. He basically said they have a team that could use someone like me, because a lot of their work is about documenting the types of things I had been working on, collating all of this information.

So that job turned out to be for their Customer Centred Design Team, and they were looking for a Prototyper. They just needed someone who understood the requirements that they were gathering, who could put that into a more tangible format, to put that in front of the Development team. So I got that job and I met this fantastic team.

There was this colleague in Orange who was kind of like my reference in this world. He came from a psychology and statistics background. He was telling me about all this research that they were doing. So he took me through everything that they did, and all the tools that they worked with, but they actually didn’t know how to put all of that into something that technical people would understand. And of course I was in my element, I knew how to do this. So we started working together.

The first time I saw the Wizard of Oz, I don’t know if you’ve seen that technique, basically that was the types of things that I ended up doing for them. The CCD team was in charge of the IVR [call centre handling software, ie. the call menus] for Orange. We had to fake it so that when someone pressed a button, the IVR robot would talk in response. Before I came along, the CCD team was doing this very manually. The user testing participant would say “one”, and then someone hidden in another box room would actually talk into the microphone in a very robotic voice and say “Okay, the options that you can choose now are…”

We co-created a little software tool with just HTML and Javascript that looked like a phone with all the numbers. Users could select the menu items by clicking numbers on the computer screen, and then pre-recorded robot responses would play, like in a real IVR.

At first I was doing a lot of technical things, but over time I realised that I really really love talking to users. We had a small lab there, people were coming in constantly and we were testing with them all the time. It was things like how well they understood Orange’s paper invoices, or we went to Orange shops and tested if people understood where things were and whether they would intuitively know what the accessories were. So all of those things. And I really loved that.

In the end they paid for my Open University course, something to do with User Interface Design, I can’t remember the exact title. My manager actually told me you know what, you really like this, you’re really passionate about it. Why don’t you study something? So you get some kind of like, physical degree for it?

I was already working in the field full-time, building up my experience, so it was super easy to do the course. I actually used my prototyping skills and some of my wireframes for the course to get the degree, but honestly, I didn’t really need to even to study for it because I was already doing it all as my day to day job.

That’s really cool. So you were there for two years. It sounds like it was a gradual and natural progression from one role to another for you. That’s really interesting.

If you think about it, I started pretty much having to write user manuals for the software and training people, which is a very good way of understanding your software, understanding your users. You need to understand how to write it for them, and focus on what you’re trying to sell. And then it gradually went from there, from understanding their needs before I started programming. Then I was introduced to UX, which I had never heard before I went to Orange.

I was wondering how your friends and family saw this progression of your career, the way your focus evolved over time? How did they understand these changes to what you were doing?

I feel like the person who will have understood the best about these changes in my job and probably encouraged me the most was my dad, who unfortunately passed away during these years. He did encourage me to join Orange. Honestly, he was very interested in what I was doing in Orange compared to what he had been doing, which was programming.

My mom is a psychologist, and she still doesn’t get what I do. To her I’m just a computer engineer, and I just do programming and I just do things with digital. It’s like, she gets a new computer and she comes to me and she goes, which one should I get, should I get a bigger hard drive? So it was difficult at first, but since I moved into leadership roles, what I do started to make more sense to her, and she can relate to it a lot more. The thing that she’s getting from my job now is that I do collaboration and participation and all of those things.

Funny enough, my husband started getting it this year, and particularly during lockdown, because he saw first hand for the first time what it is that I do. He has now seen me talk to people, figuring out what they need to do, transforming that into requirements. Then I put two boxes together and arrows between them, but now he understands where those things are coming from, and he’s starting to see that progression.

After the role in Orange, you moved into roles that were defined as designer and researcher roles, and then on to leadership. What were the highlights and the lowlights of that progression, and how did that match what you imagined a design career to be like?

I had no expectations whatsoever of my UX career, I was honestly just winging it. I was like “Okay, I really enjoy this. I’m going to go with the flow, whatever happens happens”. And so I didn’t have any expectations. Obviously what has happened absolutely exceeded my expectations because I didn’t have any. I’m really happy with how it all turned out.

Okay, high points of my career? Obviously when I was able to get the UX consultancy role with User Vision. That was quite a high point for me, because I found that I was no longer under the protection of the CCD team who actually had transformed me into a UXer. I was showing my own potential, instead of having to kind of like discover it from somewhere else.

One of my mentors still to this day is my manager at User Vision, who saw me as a UXer from day one, and who has been helping me throughout all these years. Working for User Vision was a really high point. It was one of the happiest times of my life and I always say that I want to go back to UX consultancy at some point, just because it was such a pleasure to work with them and to develop my career there.

Obviously, another highlight of my career was when I managed to get the position of Head of UX in Standard Life. I was heavily pregnant then, five months along. So I wasn’t expecting to get that opportunity at all. Once again, I feel like someone saw… not that I could prove this, but someone saw something in me and actually decided to bet on me, on me actually showing those skills. That’s how I feel, probably if you talk to those people, they will say something, I don’t know, maybe similar, maybe different.

Low points, low points. So for me, one of the low points was when I had to leave Standard Life, because of a political struggle. I really couldn’t put politics and design together. I don’t think politics is a UX concern. But it does influence my UX work in terms of having to try to sell the vision, and not just the vision for a product but for a team, for a company, for a way of working, and having to deal with people who are not even close to your vision. They’re probably in complete opposition to your vision, and then playing that game of politics of going around and trying to… that really, really was one of the lowest points for me and I felt the most useless and the most discouraged in my whole career when that happened.

It’s a constant kind of fear that I have in my head because I’ve seen what office politics can do to good teams. And I’ve seen people overcome it, but I’m always worried I’m going to fall behind in certain aspects, either in tools, or in techniques or in, in… in language, when we’re talking about design.

I never studied proper-proper design, artistic design or visual design, anything like that. And so that’s always my kind of, like, blind spot. I am confident enough to recognise that and say I don’t do visual, I don’t do graphics, let’s leave that for the people who actually have done Arts, because they know better than me. I can always give my point of view, but I’m not an expert.

In every single position I’ve worked with, I’ve always said I need a person paired with me who is strong in that, because I work much better in a pair like that.

The value that we provide is the way of thinking, the way of analysing things from a different perspective. Businesses are driven by money so we focus on that too, but that’s not the only important thing. The most important thing for us is to make sure that user interactions are as smooth as possible. As intuitive, you know, as pleasant as can be. It doesn’t matter if you show your idea through an interactive prototype, as a Sketch design or I don’t know, a piece of paper.

I want to go back to something that you said earlier. You mentioned a couple of different mentors at this point, so I want to hear about your personal experience of mentorship. How have you been using mentorship through your career and what’s been valuable about it for you?

That’s right, I still have a few mentors, each person for very different types of mentorship. My manager at User Vision is someone I turn to much more for UX and research type questions. And another manager, this time from Standard Life, is who I turn to for leadership, career path and business help.

It’s not just the two of them though, I’m still in contact with lots of people from my different roles over the years, including from the programming world.

Mentorship has helped me in many ways. I’ve had situations where I needed help for a specific situation at work, moments where I didn’t know what to do with my career (whether I wanted to continue in the same company or perhaps change paths), or even to actually help me recruit people for the type of skills I was looking for.

For example, my ex manager from Standard Life is one of my besties now, not just my mentor: if I have any type of issues, I’m able to pick up the phone and call her.This helped me a lot, even just to soundboard ideas like whether and how to get myself into the freelance scene or, you know, considering different ways of looking at the same problem. So I totally recommend it.

One of the things that was recommended to me was to create a Board of Directors for myself: If I had to ask financial kinds of questions, who would I ask? Same if I have doubts about my career path. Or HR advice, and all of those types of things. So my Board of Directors are in my head and I know who to “go to”.

There is one thing I disagree with about the method of creating your own Board of Directors though. You’re supposed to contact them and tell them that you “nominated” them. For myself, I didn’t do that part. I just kind of lined them up in my head, I observe them and take mental notes on how they succeed, and I make sure I understand what I like about them.

They’re more like your North Star rather than your caretakers. There’s no “I give you this responsibility of looking after me, do you accept it?”.

That’s right, exactly.

A bit of a different topic now: what are your biggest motivators, what drives you in this career? Have you ever thought about that?

There’s another exercise for this that I found in the same place where the Board of Directors thing came from. I worked my way through this one too, and the outcome was that my motivation for my UX career is to humanise technology.

I strongly believe that computers are not going to be like a specific part in our lives, they are going to be so integrated in our daily lives that they need to be humanised. They need to start behaving more like a person with the limitations that technology always had. Tech needs to start talking the same language and become something so natural for us that we don’t need any specific training or any manuals for dealing with it. It’s all about making things understandable, making things easy to use in a way that they become natural. That’s my biggest motivation.

Plus I obviously love digital and innovation. I do believe that technology is going to bring a better, healthier future. Even though obviously we’re still a long way away.

Where do you go with this driver in mind? Where do you see yourself moving towards in your career in like, five to 10 years? I know it’s hypothetical and really far out, but what do you think that’s gonna be like for you?

I would really like to work with AI, or working for a company that does something with augmented reality or something like that. Trying to understand how these technologies are going to be, how our world is going to be changed by them, that’s where I see myself going. I have faith that the time has come for a new way of working which involves technology that is much more human, much more emotional, much more in touch with who we are and what makes us different from machines, than up until now.

I also think I am pushing towards a different style of leadership. Being a leader means you’re a different type of team worker, that you have a different type of relationship with your colleagues, your superiors, things like that.

So that’s where I see myself, being part of leadership in a company that doesn’t just change the way we work, but also changes the way that we lead and the way we kind of experience technology.

I have a final question in relation to all this: do you think you’ll stay in design until you retire?

I think there is obviously always going to be a little bit of design in it for me, and a little bit of problem solving, a little bit of you know, caring. That’s an important point for me: as designers, we add the biggest value by caring and I will always continue to care.

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At the time of publishing of this interview, Paula is back to working in UX consultancy as a UX Director for eCity Interactive, running experiments on how AI can help with UX.▮