Bre Walker started her career as an academic advisor in higher education helping students plan their college careers. Her job was to understand students’ goals and help them access the tools they need to succeed—which, she now realizes, is not unlike UX research.

That’s when Bre realized she wanted to be of service to others. She had always found a way to dabble in design—while working as an executive assistant in the men’s basketball program at UCLA, she taught herself Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator and quickly became the de facto graphic designer on the team.

While enrolled in Springboard’s UX Career Track, she completed an Industry Design Project, an internship placement program that allows students to work with a real-world client. She interned with LOC Coin, a cryptocurrency startup based in South Africa. The experience of working with an overseas company challenged her to understand a different type of consumer culture, while also working within other constraints such as lack of technology access and uneven mobile broadband coverage.

“It was really good practice in not thinking about myself or thinking only from my perspective,” said Bre.

From her past experiences in higher ed that taught her to understand and empathize with other people’s needs—an invaluable skill for any UX designer—Bre believes that UX designers should enter the field with a “service-oriented mindset.” Her role as UX designer, she says, is to make digital products more accessible. “In my opinion, it’s a big responsibility to build something that a lot of people will touch and see.”

Bre recently landed a six-month contract position as a product designer at KeyBank, a retail banking company headquartered in Cleveland, where she works on consumer-facing products.

Yeah, I just landed a six-month contract position with KeyBank. I am working on their financial planning tools, which is a consumer-facing product, and it has been really exciting. They've got a really awesome budding UX design studio with a lot of designers, so it’s been really awesome getting to work with other people.

Product design is end-to-end. Sometimes it depends on the company you work for in terms of how they label it because my focus right now is absolutely UX, but the majority of my meetings are with the entire team—I meet with development, our product owner, our business analyst. So there are a lot of stakeholders, but the UX process isn’t siloed from the rest of the product development process. I'm in those conversations from the very beginning before anything has been written down or documented. Then I stay with the product or the feature that I'm working on from discovery all the way through implementation and even updating it after launch.

Product design is end-to-end. Sometimes it depends on the company you work for in terms of how they label it because my focus right now is absolutely UX, but the majority of my meetings are with the entire team—I meet with development, our product owner, our business analyst. So there are a lot of stakeholders, but the UX process isn’t siloed from the rest of the product development process. I'm in those conversations from the very beginning before anything has been written down or documented. Then I stay with the product or the feature that I'm working on from discovery all the way through implementation and even updating it after launch.

It’s a really comprehensive process. I think Springboard touches on all of these things, so I definitely felt prepared to have those conversations with engineers, developers, and the product owners very early on. It's a collaborative sort of experience; you're really involved in the minutiae of the entire product development process.

Oh, absolutely. The great thing about working with KeyBank is they're really into UX design, so I love being able to bring the UX process into the product design process just by being an advocate for the user. I think a lot of times business goals are already well-established so it’s important to step back and say, “Let's think about this from the user perspective." Or while we're in the discovery phase figuring out what a feature should look like and how the user is going to move through the different flows that we establish, it's nice to have that UX background.

Before this, I was an executive assistant in the marketing department, so I can speak the language of a project manager or a business analyst. Having both of those languages allows me to move between the two and put things in a perspective that they can appreciate and understand.

I got my bachelor's in African American studies and sociology, and then I got my master's in marketing. [The reason why I chose these fields] is that I really appreciate understanding people and communicating well, and I think those are two big parts of UX design. My first job out of grad school was in higher education as an academic mentor. So it's funny, I was still looking for marketing jobs, but I really liked working on a college campus. You work with students to help them develop and grow. That was my first introduction to user research because every student has a different background, they all have different needs and learning styles. So it was my job to do research and understand their different learning styles and help them find tools that would work for them.

This is similar to what you do in UX—making sure you understand people wherever they are in their journey, and helping them get the tools they need to be successful and reach their goals.

When I landed a job as an executive assistant at UCLA, graphic design wasn't part of the job description, but there was clearly a need for it. So I taught myself Photoshop and Illustrator and developed those skills because it was something I was really interested in.

I've never been overwhelmingly interested in selling things to people; I’m more interested in being of service to people. I did some research and realized I wanted to make a career change, and that’s when I came across UX and I was like, “Wow, this represents all the things I’ve ever wanted to do.”

I knew I didn't want to just be a graphic designer. I wanted to do more than just create visuals; I wanted to build things. I knew that I wanted to make things that were of use to other people, like helping them grow their business or spread awareness about something. So I started to investigate web development and frontend design and that’s when I came across UX. I'm a research-oriented person in general so I watch a lot of YouTube videos and read articles.

I didn't want to go back to school; I wanted a quicker way to get into UX design. So I started to look up different boot camps, and that's when I eventually found Springboard.

Having a one-on-one mentor that I could meet with weekly was really, really important. That was probably the biggest differentiator. When I looked at other programs that did have a mentor in place in some capacity, they were really expensive and Springboard was the most affordable. So Springboard was great because I could get all of the things that I really wanted at a price that made sense to me. Then I watched a bunch of YouTube videos by people who had been through the program.

I reached out on LinkedIn to a few people who had been to different boot camps to get their perspective and Springboard by far had the most positive reviews and people really appreciated having a mentor. Also the student community—being able to work with other students on projects.

Phenomenal. Charlotte was so great. I love her. She was really experienced, knowledgeable, and approachable. She would push me and challenge me, which was great because it made me step out of my comfort zone and think bigger, and be a little bolder in my designs. She would also challenge me to defend my designs, which really prepared me to interview because I knew why I was making certain decisions. I could really vouch for my design decisions because I would have to have a good reason when I talked to her about it—it had to have something to do with the research or the user.

My project was a little challenging because the client and I were in two very different time zones. So we had to figure out a process that works for us as a group. I worked with a cryptocurrency startup called LOC Coin, which is based in South Africa, so they have a different cultural perspective. So for us, it was really about understanding the user. I led the user research on that project. Since the product was focused on personal finance, we had to consider things like rewards and loyalty programs.

South Africa has a very different consumer culture than [the US]. So it was really good practice in not thinking about myself or thinking only from my perspective. For one, 75% of South Africans are in a loyalty rewards program. On average, they’re enrolled in five and a half loyalty rewards programs. So it's pretty significant. The other factor was technology constraints. It's very common in America for everyone to have unlimited data on their cell phones and to have coverage almost everywhere, but that's not necessarily the case in South Africa. So when you’re building an app but 70% of your user base prefers to have a physical loyalty rewards card that they can swipe at the store, trying to get them to use a digital alternative is going to be a challenge.

Working on this project gave me so much perspective on all the constraints you can run into when you're trying to design something. Cryptocurrency is also relatively new and a lot of people don’t understand it at all.

In general, people are overwhelmingly financially illiterate. So when you bring cryptocurrency into it, you have to really pay attention to the UX writing because you need to be able to explain things in a super simple way. So that project was really great because everything we did from the user flow to the writing, to thinking about the process and understanding the user was all about empathy and really understanding where people were and how to make a tool that's adaptable.

For me, it’s less about UX writing, but I'm really interested in making sure that accessibility is built into the things that I design so that everyone can use them. I think a lot of times, accessibility is an afterthought, like a feature you add later as opposed to how you approach the design from your font to your color scheme. As I get deeper into my career, I want to dive deeper into accessibility for sure.

When people think about accessibility, especially if you're not a UX designer, you think about widgets or big fonts. But people often forget little things like the contrast. Color is really important and not everyone can see color. Something as small as the color that you use on a button can put a huge damper on the user experience for someone. Accessibility also means consideration of edge cases. Let’s say you have a really long name and you're filling out a form but there’s a character limit; it will say you don't have a valid name. That's an accessibility issue that people don't think about a lot. People often think only about impairments, but if I am a person who has 12 letters in my last name and I can't write my whole name then I can't use your product.

I would say my mentor. It took me 10 months to complete the course. It was a long process and it can feel like a lot of work when you’re going it alone. it's very different being on a team or having other people in the room. Having a mentor you can bounce things off of, someone who's experienced and can reassure you, that's super helpful.

I think if I had taken the course by myself with no mentor, I just wouldn't have known for sure if what I was doing was good. Because it's one thing to complete a course and it's another thing to complete a course that gets you to a place where you can get a job based on the quality of work that you've done.

Do your research. Don't make any assumptions about what it is. We build things and we work with a lot of other people. Sometimes you will be the only designer in a company, but you won’t be doing anything alone.

For me, UX represented a combination of my values. It's really important to me to support people, to do things that make the world a better place, and to provide access to technology. These are values that align with me in this career path.

When you're first starting, you probably have to be somewhat of a generalist but as you go along, find out if there are certain parts of the process that stand out to you. Maybe you're really into research and understanding people, or perhaps visual design.

In my opinion, it's a big responsibility to build something that a lot of people will touch and see. So I think it's important to go into UX design with a service-oriented mindset.