So excited to connect with an old colleague Evan Tyerman. Evan is the Director of Design Operations at Prudential Financial and an all-around great human. Evan has a very interesting background that led him to User Experience Design.

Previously he was in the biomedical engineering field, Evan has always been passionate about helping people. His background in engineering drives him to discover the unknown, while his empathy and compassion in helping people helps him to understand the wonder of people. Ultimately, his understanding of users, along with his creativity, inspires Evan to create experiences to change the world. To Evan, User Experience is more than a job or a skill set; it is a passion.

Evan and I talk about his experience in discovering UX design, telling his parents he was leaving the Biomedical Engineering field. How passion fuels a great designer and his experience with General Assembly. I'm very excited for Evan and his new role and I can't wait to share his story with you.

You can connect with Evan at https://www.linkedin.com/in/evantyerman/

Transcript

Thomas 0:40

Howdy, welcome to the user flows podcast, it's great to have you back. This week, we're gonna be talking with Evan Tyerman, who is the director of design operations at Prudential financial, Evan and I worked together for some time, he was a really fun guy to work with. And I'm really excited about his new position and new role. And I can't wait to dig into that with him. Evan previously comes from the biomedical engineering field. And he's always been very passionate about helping people, which is what led him to UX design. And his background in engineering really drives him to discover the unknown, while his empathy and compassion and helping people help them to understand the wonder of people.

And ultimately, his understanding of users, along with his creativity, inspires Evan to create experiences to change the world. And to Evan user experience is more than a job or a skill set. It's about passion. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So welcome, Evan, it's great to have you here tonight. I'm really excited to talk to you. It's been a while since we've seen each other. So for everybody listening, Evan and I work together at Prudential financial, and Evan has just been named design operations director. Is that correct?

Evan 1:50

That is correct. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me.

Thomas 1:52

Yeah, no problem, man. So I wanted to talk to you a bit about it because you have a very interesting kind of background. And also, you were one of those people that I was, you know, very blown away by when I started working with you, because you kind of welcomed me into Prudential, I think you're the first person that kinda, you know, showed up at my desk, you had a whole kind of care package of Prudential gear and stuff, which was really cool. And you got me set up with my machine and everything going. And so very nice cards from everybody. And I think once you stopped doing that role, onboarding the people that came in after me was just terrible. So it was a very nice welcome.

Evan 2:31

It's funny bringing up because you were actually the first person that I did that to, as well. You were pretty much the first person we brought in, I think, after I started kind of revamping our onboarding system, and I think it worked well, on the first shot.

Thomas 2:45

Yeah. When great. It went great. That's great. Yeah, but you were definitely, you know, wise beyond your ears. I, I figured you had been working in UX for a number of years. And then I found out that this was like your first big role, which, in UX design, kind of blew me away. So if you don't mind, would you kind of dive into, you know, how you ended up at Prudential and how you went from biomedical engineering?

Evan 3:10

Yeah, biomedical engineering. Yeah, I mean, definitely a crazy journey. Over the past. I graduated college, and dirty as a biomedical engineer in 2017. So past, let's say, four years. Yeah, that's definitely a wild wild ride. I don't know how far you want me to go back. But you know, I could go back kind of, like what I started hearing about, about the world of UX and my kind of emergence into that. So you know, towards kind of the end of my college career, and you know, I went to NJIT. Thinking that I really wanted to be into like, problem-solving, and really kind of taking on critical problems, and putting, you know, my eyes on it and trying to solve in ways that other people wouldn't think about solving it. And that's just kind of how who I was as a person, you know, growing up, I really love complicated problems.

Both my parents were engineers, so, you know, more or less, I was kind of destined to go to an engineering school and kind of fall in their footsteps. But as I was kind of going through that, I did realize that, um, you know, the problems that I was solving weren't fulfilling, you know, I was doing kind of, you know, I went into the area of biomedical engineering because I wanted to help people to that was another motivation for me. But I feel like the problems we're so we're solving, we're solving at such a slow pace, and I wasn't really fulfilling to be, you know, on a project, I would see fruition in five to 10 years. I wanted to see, you know, immediate change, and I wanted to really work at a fast pace. And that's really what kind of made me step away from the world of biomedical engineering and look towards other avenues I can use like those same kinds of problem-solving techniques, but also in the same way, you know, try to really help people and get to know and learn about people. And a lot of my close friends, one of the previous ones you had on your podcast, Brian, good, good college friend of mine, he really, you know, opened me up to the world of UX and what it is, and he showed me, you know, you got to involve the users in creating these designs.

Actually, for college, I was very kind of design was a little bit of my hobby. So I like to, you know, I worked as like, you know, PR managers for certain organizations, you know, doing flyers and learning Photoshop. So like, I still have, you know, a little bit of love for design, I never really like kind of dove into it. But, you know, he showed me that like, UX was a crossroad of, you know, design and problem-solving. And also, you know, involving your users at the end of the day. And I saw that, and I don't know what it was like a light bulb kind of hit. Yeah. And, you know, that's when I realized, like, oh, wow, this might be like, more of a career for me than engineering. So, you know, by the time I made that decision, it was kind of towards the end of my college career. So I was like, Okay, let me suck it up. Let me finish college, and we get a degree, let me make my parents happy.

Hopefully, they don't hear this. But let me finish off college strong. And let me look into this career path. And I was actually very surprised to find that I wasn't, I wasn't alone, there were a lot of people that really came from very non-traditional backgrounds in UX design, and found their way into this field. And a lot of them did go through courses. So a lot of them weren't really coming out of right out of college. A lot of them were coming through these kinds of pipelines of I went to General Assembly, but there was a lot of other kinds of programs like that, that people were just kind of going doing a quick course, you know, over, you know, a couple of months, and having some sort of design document. And that's why I really, like really brought me into the design as I can, you know, for a very minimal amount of time, I can really kind of changed my career trajectory, and really find a way into this field, that I didn't need to redo college at all. And that, that was another big thing that really likes, made it worth it.

Thomas 7:19

Yeah. Yeah, it's a huge time and cost savings, right?

Evan 7:23

Oh, yeah, for sure. You know, and that was also a big seller for my parents to you know, it was pretty crazy for them, you know, they paid a good majority of my college to say, like, I'm not gonna use that degree anymore. I'm gonna go find something else. Yeah, and then I was, you know, sitting there ready to foot the bill. And I was like, Oh, wait, now I really need to think about how I'm going to afford this. And that actually made it you know, going to a school where it was just a few months really made it worth it. And then coming out of that, you know, I really did have at least the skill set to do what, what was needed to get kind of an entry-level into the job.

I didn't, you know, I didn't have like a full sense to be like a full, mid-level designer, but I did have the kind of the skill set needed. And the rest of it was kind of my drive and determination. Yeah, we got to get over the finish line and find that like, really kind of start to your career. So yeah, going through General Assembly definitely was the right choice. It definitely wouldn't have changed it to the world. And I met a lot of great people along the way to a lot of like I said, a lot of people came from non-traditional backgrounds, there were architects in our class, there was fashion designers, photographers, even a geologist was in our class learning to be a UX designer.

Yeah, she, you know, studied rocks, and then decided to shoot on this many people. And I thought that that was really like, you know, not to get too deep, like, I thought that was really beautiful that people were coming from all different walks of life, yeah, int