About my current job
I help design the framework for how NOW TV works, including helping customers access the movie, TV show or sports match they want to see as quickly and easily as possible. I design how NOW TV might work on a TV, tablet, mobile, desktop, etc! This could include looking at what needs to be on a page, how a user is going to navigate around and what information they'll need. My team and I research and test things out with users at all stages, to make sure that what we're creating is actually doing the job we hope it will!
Something important I learned during my time at EP
I learned to embrace ambiguity. There are very few definite answers in psychology, just differing theories that can all be convincingly argued for or against using current research. As a person with a stubbornly logical mind, that was difficult to accept at first, but it's an important lesson to learn!
How did my education influence my career path?
After I graduated, I went to work at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. I worked on, and eventually ran, accreditation programmes for mental health services. The link with EP was obvious as I was working with standards for mental health care every day, and I really built on my knowledge about mental illness from my undergraduate degree.
Choosing to transition into User Experience (UX) Design this last year might not seem an obvious progression from EP at first, but I went into psychology because I was curious about how people's minds work. In UX Design, the heart of my job is empathy, i.e. getting into the user's shoes and trying to understand how they perceive and use my product. What job does the user need the product for? What are they going to expect when using it? Does it delight them? You can learn the behavioural norms for how people use an app or a website and use those to make your own app or website better. There's no substitute for research though. Testing your own app or website with users and using their feedback to make it better.
How did friends made during your time at EP influence your life?
One of my friends from EP ended up working in the Behavioural Insights Team in Australia. They create (often deceptively simple) behavioural interventions to improve public services and inform policy. In 2017, I was lucky enough to be awarded a research grant to visit Australia, New Zealand and Finland to look at world class and innovative care for people with psychosis. I met up with him in Sydney and reconnected, which was brilliant because now our work is broadly related. We are both looking at how to encourage certain behaviours - him in the public sector, me in the private.
Do you have a lesson or advice that you'd give to current students/researchers at EP?
You can have a proper laugh at your writing style if you re-read your dissertation a few years later.
With the benefit of hindsight, do you have any advice you'd give your younger self?
I'd tell her that it's OK not to have it all figured out. When I left Oxford, I had no idea what I wanted to do for a job. Ten years after graduating, I'm really excited to have just chosen a new career. I don't regret the work I did in the interim years (working at a mental health charity) at all. I learned loads and the experience helped me to get my new job. Don't put too much pressure on yourself to have it all figured out straight away!
