What’s it really like to work at Chicago startups and tech companies? Blue Sky’s Inside Job lets people on the ground tell us in their own words.
Becca Noffsinger, 28, User Experience Designer at Fuzzy Math
We’re a user experience design firm based in Chicago. We do research and strategy, and we do evaluation and synthesis of that research.
Clients come to us and they ask for website redesign. I’m responsible for developing the information structure and how the particular web tool would work and be laid out, and then the visual designers come in and make it look really, really nice with colors and typography and all that fun stuff.
There’s usually some kind of user research involved, either an online survey or having a phone call with users or interviewing them in person. Research can take two to four weeks. I think that’s really advantageous to our clients — to have an understanding of their user base before we start designing is super-important.
I really like the overall variety of things I get to work on here. We work on a lot of different industries. I’ve gotten to learn about chemicals in the workplace, an economic forecasting application, and the next thing I’m working on are bike parts. It’s really cool to get to learn about all these things but know that our process applies to every type of project.
I actually did not know UX design existed until I started my first job out of college. I went to school (at Augustana College) for math and computer science. I actually was writing code for three years after I graduated. At my first job, I was a web developer.
While I was while I was at that job, we had hired our first user experience designer. She basically became my first UX mentor. I was doing a lot of reading, and I went to a weeklong interaction design class at a firm in San Francisco and did a lot on my own to build up a portfolio and get into this field. I was drawn to UX because it’s kind of a middle ground between something very technical and something very people-focused.
I went to a small consulting firm as a user experience designer, and I left for culture reasons. I felt like I had some good ideas, but they were just kind of skated over.
I found Fuzzy Math just by Googling “user experience design firms in Chicago.” I found Fuzzy Math’s website, and I thought it was really interesting how they talked about how they’re pragmatic problem solvers. They seemed like a really smart bunch of folks, really practical, like design is important, but it’s important for solving problems more than it’s important to have a lot of bells and whistles. I cold e-mailed them, and they happened to be hiring. It was very lucky.
(Co-founder) Mark (Baldino) described our culture once as a “fun library,” and that really stuck with me because I thought it was accurate. I feel that fits us very well. We’re all kind of introverts, and we’re all very passionate about what we do. And we’re all a little bit quirky, too. Because we’re small — there are 11 of us — we all know each other pretty well. I feel it’s a little bit like a second family.
Maybe once every quarter, we do Fuzzy Math Fridays. We’ll do a retrospective, which means looking at our own company and what we should keep doing, what we should change. Usually, there’s like a fun activity involved, maybe playing a game or going out to get a drink.
Sometimes, during Fuzzy Math Fridays, we do “Meet Me” presentations. People will take turns doing a presentation on themselves. It could be photos from childhood or stories about how they grew up. Talking about viola — I’ve been playing since fourth grade and play with the Chicago Metropolitan Symphony, a community orchestra — was part of my presentation.
We have two weeks off at the end of the year — the office closes down — which is super nice for the holidays, so we don’t have to worry about saving our time off until the end of the year.
We can order whatever we want from Peapod, as long as it’s a breakfast item. It’s like going grocery shopping, but for the office. I like making instant oatmeal and putting peanut butter and strawberries in it. It’s like deconstructed peanut butter and jelly. There’s a lot of office opinions about what kind of peanut butter you should use.
There’s an emphasis here on learning and collaboration. Even if your opinions don’t get implemented or into the design, people will still listen to you. It’s a very healthy culture.
As told to freelance reporter Erin Chan Ding. Stories are edited for length and clarity.
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