My first real, dedicated UI/UX job was at RIM, Research In Motion, BlackBerry, in Waterloo, in 2010. I was young, it was a big name, and I walked into what I slowly realized was one of the most instructive disasters I'd ever witness up close.
Not my disaster, I should say. I had the best seat in the house.
Context, for anyone who wasn't watching phones in 2010: by most of the numbers that mattered, BlackBerry was at its peak. Tens of millions of devices a year, the default phone of business and government and anyone who typed for a living, and Waterloo was the center of that world. By the numbers that would matter next, it was already over. The iPhone was three years old. The rules had changed, from hardware to software, from keys to glass, from spec sheets to feel, and the scoreboard just hadn't updated yet.
My seat was interfaces: motion and interaction concepts, working out how screens could move and feel. Which put me at the exact pressure point of the whole story. The screen was the thing the company's future depended on, inside an organization whose identity, processes, and pride had been built around something else entirely. And here's the part that made it instructive rather than just sad: nobody was stupid, and nobody was lazy. I watched a building full of smart, hardworking people lose to a paradigm shift, up close, in real time. You don't forget that. You also stop believing that talent and effort are enough on their own, which is a useful thing to stop believing at twenty-something.
The education stuck. The interface had stopped being a layer on top of the product; it had become the product, and any company treating screens as a secondary concern was going to be taught the same lesson eventually. I decided early to be on the other side of it. Most of what I've done since traces back to taking the screen seriously before I had another choice.
Some educations you pay for. This one paid me.
A longer essay version of this case study is in progress.