After 35 Years in UX, I'm Starting Over — On My Own Terms
Image created with ChatGPT by the author.
This is my last week in my UX career. This is my choice to follow my own advice and pursue something different in this next chapter.
After a 35-year career in the web space focused primarily on User Experience Design and leadership, I'm moving on. Several projects have been percolating for some time, and it's finally their turn.
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What's Next
The first is coaching. If you're reading this post, that should come as no surprise. I have many plans for how I want to shape this work and hope you'll continue to follow along.
The second is AI consulting. I've been heavily invested in generative AI for so many tasks in my personal and professional life, and I've come to learn that many people are confused, intimidated, or outright fearful of what they think it can or will do. Others want to understand how it can benefit them but feel overwhelmed by the choices and the rhetoric. I hope to bring clarity and practical practices to that group — especially coaches, solo businesses, and non-profits.
The third is the one that started everything: art and photography. Some of you may not know that my earliest passions were always art of all kinds and photography. I taught myself how to use a Mac in art school, and that's what opened the doors to a thriving UX career. It's been a successful path, but one that pushed my creative work to the side more than I ever intended. I kept some personal projects alive and had real success with photography when I lived in Chicago — family portraits, dog photography, landscapes that made their way into restaurants, coffee shops, group shows, and galleries around the city and suburbs. I'm resurrecting that work here in Tucson, with a website coming soon and now the time to explore the remarkable landscapes I'm living in. I'm especially drawn to street photography, something I've never done but feel pulled toward every time I walk through the history and art that's woven into this city.
I'm more excited than anything else about this new path. It's one I've prepared for over several years of deliberate planning.
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Leaving at the Right Time
My identity as a UX guy has sustained my career for a long time, and my reputation kept me afloat during periods of incredible upheaval in the early internet days. I have so many people to thank for their faith in me during that time. I'm walking away from a solid job with great benefits and colleagues I genuinely enjoy — people who have made the weeks since my announcement a period filled with emotion and gratitude. I believe I'm leaving at the right time. My accomplishments and the impact I've had on others gives me a real sense of pride and closure. As UX enters its next phase — shaped by AI and a pace of change faster than anything I've seen in my career — I'm ready for something new.
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A 30-Day Plan for Myself
When people ask what my plan is, I speak to those three areas. But before I run full speed into any of them, I'm doing something I've always done for others and never done for myself: building a 30-day transition plan.
I've created 30-60-90 day plans for new team members throughout my career. Now it's my turn. And as motivated as I am to sprint into this new life, I recognize I'm also leaving an old one behind. That deserves some intention.
Part of what I need to do is decouple my UX career from my identity. That manifests in a lot of ways, but one of the most obvious is social media. LinkedIn is a primary platform for reaching potential clients, which means I need to start showing up there as my next-version self — pulling back the UX content and focusing on the people and topics I'm now oriented around. That's not a small thing after years of building a following around shared UX interests. I've already started this on Facebook and Instagram, consistently pruning what shows up in my feed until it reflects friends, family, art, and photography. The algorithm responds. It can be changed.
There's also a decoupling needed in my physical space. My home office is currently set up to facilitate remote work — optimized for video calls and eating lunch between meetings. I want to rearrange it for something different: focused, self-directed time rather than a day built around other people's schedules.
And then there's the mental decoupling. I want to mark this transition with something intentional — maybe a day wandering through museums, or simply returning to a morning practice of meditation, journaling, and a walk. Since moving to Arizona I've kept Chicago working hours, which means the morning routine I loved has quietly disappeared. I want it back.
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What happens next will be shaped by my own effort, a little luck, and chance. I've always believed we're never fully in control of how life plays out. But I'm in a place where I can give my full attention, freely and without constraint, to new ideas. It feels like a gift — and I also know I worked hard to get here.
