Kathy Beymer might now be a career-long user experience (UX) designer and the founder of craft website Merriment Design, but as an undergraduate university student, she’d never really thought about pursuing a creative career.
Instead, she graduated with a psychology degree and landed a job in the technology team at Andersen Consulting — better known today as Accenture — in Chicago. Here, she found herself trying to figure out how to make user-facing applications more useful to actual human beings.
“I was really interested in how we organise and design an application, a website, whatever it is, so that it works for people and it’s useful and usable,” she says.
“I quickly discovered that design really affects the whole mood of what you’re working with. You can have two products that do the exact same thing, but it’s really the design that makes the product special.”
An international qualification
Beymer didn’t know it at the time, but this was her first introduction to UX design — and she was hooked. She started looking into postgraduate study as a way to fast-track her learning, as well as to formalise her design experience.
The UTS Graduate Diploma in Design soon caught her eye.
“It was actually the design of the UTS website that led me to it, because compared to other schools at the time, it was more technically advanced,” she says.
After arriving in Sydney, she was gratified to discover that the course was everything she’d been hoping for.
To begin with, it was taught by design practitioners whose professional insights helped students draw the link between learning and practice.
And the teaching staff had no qualms about pushing students outside their comfort zones — not only was Beymer immersed in the world of design, but she was constantly challenged to think about design from multiple perspectives.
I had a little bit more of a strength in interaction design because that’s the job I’d been in, but the program had me doing projects in costume design, interior design, I did a film design project, book design, web design, marketing, so you were doing the same design process, but you had to apply it in different ways.
“When you’re not a designer, and I’d never studied design before, it can feel very magical, but I learned that there really is a process and a structure and design thinking behind it all.”
From design theory to design practice
At the end of the graduate diploma, Beymer headed back to the US and to her job with Accenture, but the design world was calling. Before long, she moved into an agency role at Chicago-based Giant Step, which was later acquired by industry giant Leo Burnett.
At the time, the digital revolution was picking up speed, which meant that Beymer’s skills were in high demand as companies took their brands online. She worked with everyone from United Airlines to Kraft Philadelphia Cream Cheese, applying her UTS learning to the ever-changing challenges of the digital realm.
In 2008, she moved from Leo Burnett to a boutique agency called Designkitchen and then into freelance work, where she’s been ever since. Today, she juggles UX work for clients like Northwestern University with her passion for crafting, which she’s poured into establishing Merriment Design.
At Merriment Design, she delivers ‘handmade-not-homemade’ designs for big brands like LEGO, Disney, VELCRO and more. Her work has been featured on everything from Rachael Ray Everyday Magazine and on HGTV to Time Out magazine, the BBC Morning Live show, and HuffPost.
But, while handmade Christmas baubles, unicorn birthday bunting and sew-your-own pencil cases may have little in common with site maps and usability testing, Beymer sees a clear link between her creative and professional lives.
“I really like making things that are useful and usable and also special and clever,” she says.
“Both aspects of my work are about putting people at the centre of design and trying to think about who’s going to use this, what problem could this solve or how could this bring them a little joy?”
