Almost 25 years ago, I found myself sitting on a beach on the east coast of Ireland. I was with my good friend Rick who I studied together with at the University. We both had more or less quit our ‘first real’ jobs in Washington D.C. and decided to to take our savings and hit the road in Europe. Ireland was our first stop.

After consuming a decent portion of a bottle of Paddy’s Irish whisky we started to talk about jobs and the future. Rick studied English and Drama so he always had a flare for describing things well (in contrast to my Architect/Engineering view of the world).

A year and half ago I left the consulting world and began working at a product company.

It was an exciting move, and I was very quickly thrown into the world of software development, a world very different from the one I had left.

I was given a word of advice from another UX designer already working in the company early on.

'Just keep ahead of the developers, if you get behind with the wireframes you are dead'

The products were very technically complex and the interaction challenges considerable. I started creating some fairly hi-fidelity wireframes