Hi, my name is Jake Ruef. I'm a lead UX & product designer from Chicago.

I've always been someone who wants to understand how things work. That can mean a product, a process, an organization, or something completely unrelated to design that I happened to become curious about that day. Once I realize there's something I don't quite understand, I have a hard time leaving it alone.

That tendency has shaped my career more than any deliberate plan ever has. It wasn't until I took my first digital design class that I discovered I could turn my talent for art and fascination with technology into a career. Years later, something similar happened again.

As an Art Director, I became increasingly interested in everything beyond the creative layer of the websites I was designing. I understood how HTML and CSS drove the front end, but wanted to know more about the platform behind it so I could understand its limitations and design with them instead of against them. That curiosity soon extended to questions like why one navigation structure worked better than the next, or what made someone click one button over another.

The more I understood, the stronger my design decisions became and the quicker I could reach them. Eventually, I asked for more time to help other designers make sense of technical and usability considerations, while continuing to act as a translator between disciplines. What I expected to be a shift in responsibilities instead became a Lead UX role. Once again, I'd found a career path I hadn't fully realized was there.

Moving into UX didn't change my standards for design craft. It broadened my understanding of what design could accomplish.

These days, I'm as interested in creating the conditions for good design as I am in the design itself. I like asking the questions that help a team understand the problem more clearly, finding patterns across seemingly unrelated issues, and turning that understanding into something useful. Sometimes that's an interface, a framework or a shared resource. Other times, it's simply a better way of approaching the next problem.

Outside of work, the curiosity doesn't really switch off. I'm usually learning how something works, exploring some new technology, researching a question long after I've found the answer I was looking for, or convincing myself that a perfectly ordinary problem deserves a much more thorough investigation.

It's probably the same instinct that shaped my career in the first place.