How the socialist GDR laid the foundation for the UX career I have today
I was 18 when the socialist regime died in East Germany. Being part of this pivotal moment in 20th Century history was not only awe inspiring, it was perfect timing. And, little did I know that it was the socialist regime who laid the foundation for the Internet career I have today.
I remember the night the Berlin Wall came down like it happened yesterday. At the very moment Politburo official Günter Schabowski prematurely announced the opening of the border, I was partying with my pals and we missed it. It was a school party, planned long before we could even imagine the fall of the Berlin Wall. There were people who didn’t hear the news until they woke with hangovers the next morning.
In my hometown, Neuruppin, a small town near the German capital, we 30,000 Germans had gotten used to living side by side with 30,000 Russian soldiers. I was puzzled that morning to see a long queue of local people in front of the local police station.
“Perhaps the police are giving away bananas to calm down protesters?” I joked to a man waiting in line. He turned and looked at me in amazement. “Don’t tell me you missed Schabowski’s announcement! Get in line and get your stamp!” he insisted. So that’s exactly what I did: I waited patiently to have my ID stamped. Every GDR citizen had to carry his ID all the time.
Once the ink was dry I kept staring at it. One tiny stamp and I could cross the border to West Berlin — the entrance to a whole new world. But the crowds were so crazy that day that I didn’t end up setting foot in West Berlin for another week.
Whether the GDR was gone forever or could stay alive in another form, it was impossible to say. What was certain was that there was no going back: The border could not shut again. Overnight, it felt like new horizons had suddenly opened for me. Now I could pursue the career I’d always wanted. Finally I would become a journalist.
Four years earlier, I had been called to the headmaster’s office — to take part in what was called a “Student Intent Survey” (Studienwunscherfassung). Like everybody else my age with grades good enough to go to university, my headmaster wanted to find out what I wanted to do with my life. An innocent question, but for him a way of steering future students into fields of study the socialist economy thought would be important in a few years time.
“So, you want to become a journalist?” he said, pulling a book from the shelf. “Look, this is the amount of spare spaces for future journalists at the university in Leipzig.” He was pointing at a really tiny slice of a pie chart in that book. “See that big slice here?” he added. “Once you’ve finished school and have done your service in the National People’s Army, our country will need loads of people in the field of electronics.”
If I was ever under the illusion that I had a choice, it was quickly shattered. By the end of our conversation he had refused to give his permission for my move to high school if I stuck to my plan of becoming a journalist. However, if I said that my intended path of study was to be in electronics, he would not only give the green light for my final school leaving exams, but he would also offer me one more incentive: I could use the brand new personal computer KC 85 the local “Young Technician’s Station” just got. This made a 14 year old boy thinking …
I’d been doing my research and after talking to some working journalists I decided that the GDR was not the perfect environment to develop a satisfying career as a reporter. My mind was made up: A couple of days later I told the headmaster that I would accept his offer and I changed my study wish.
So here I stood after the wall just came down, in my third year as a trainee for “skilled engineering worker for electronic elements” and right before my university-entrance-diploma. I had gathered experience in BASIC programming and a solid education in laser physics. I had built several electronic devices myself and had fiddled around with dBase. Together with another trainee, I had put the company’s computer centre to good use when we built a database for rating the girls at our school on a 1 to 10 scale. All in all I had not only built a solid understanding of how technical things worked but an overall curiosity in new technology and in finding out how to put it to use with people in mind. All this experience, but I still hankered after the career I was not allowed to pursue before …
So I decided to finish my final year of study at a regular high school.
Changing school in 1990 was surprisingly easy. Back then a lot of pupils in higher industrial trainings switched to regular high schools. By doing this we were able to get diplomas valid for any kind of university, instead of being only allowed to study in a college of technology.
The technical school I came from had concentrated on maths, chemistry and physics, and having set my sights on being a future technical specialist I had already done more than the groundwork in those subjects.
In fact, I found that the education my new classmates were getting was far more basic than I’d been used to. In the first physics lesson I attended they were calculating the rolling speed of a cylinder from an inclined plane. Only, one week earlier I had calculated the wave length of light emitted by an electron changing its energy level.
So, for the next nine months, I focused on getting my diploma in biology. I hadn’t received any higher education in biology so I needed to catch up on the material the other pupils in this regular high school had learned for the last two years.
In my spare time I started pursuing my journalist career: I was lucky enough to get a freelance job at the local newspaper, and I began to learn the craft of writing and taking photographs.
All that work paid off and the newspaper offered me an editorial traineeship. I jumped at the chance since this is usually only given to people coming straight from university.
Maybe it was because journalists with a non-socialist background were hard to find in those days — I don’t know, but after my traineeship I was offered an editor’s job without anyone asking about my non-existent university degree.
Even when I moved on to a bigger newspaper, which was owned by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung − a publishing company renowned for its very conservative attitude regarding the education of its editors — no one seemed to care about the fact that I had not seen a university from the inside.
I know it probably was a case of being in the right place at the right time, but what had also counted had been my experience and my interest in technology. Without advertising my skills I became the go-to if anyone had any technical issues in the editorial departments — be it computer problems in the office or if they needed someone to write articles about technology.
With the rise of the Internet I felt that there were big opportunities newspapers needed to embrace for their own survival. The more I thought about it, the more impatient I got. So I took a couple of months off to work as an intern with a company called Amazon in Seattle.
I am sure this was the crucial turning point of my career. The mixture of knowledge I had, fueled by journalism and my technical education, made it easy for me to understand what was going on.
Soon I got the task to build an Intranet for all the folk working in the “Biergarten”, which was how the Amazon people referred to the German department in Seattle.
Interesting factoid: This was in 1999 and the “Biergarten” was busy translating Amazon’s auction website into German back then, which turned out not to be the Ebay killer everyone had expected.
After my internship in Seattle I took a job offer as an editor for Amazon’s German retail site — to build up the Software & CD-ROM business and boom… there I was, now journalist turned product manager.
Testing and writing reviews about retail software was great. It fed my hunger for all kinds of new software features and taught me about user experience. Every day new samples arrived, be it the latest Photoshop or an educational game for 7 year olds — it was up to me whether I took the time to review it myself or gave it to a freelance author for testing.
I saw loads of different interface concepts and found out what worked for users and what did not. “UX” and “Usability Testing” were completely unknown terms for me, but with the help of family and friends I developed empathy for users. And I studied all the reports regarding the clicks on the teasers we wrote for Amazon’s portal page.
This proved to be a good base to start from. Since then I am learning new things about UX every day. Today I am Head of UX at gutefrage.net, the biggest Q&A platform in Germany, helping my colleagues to find answers which make the products we build so much better for our users.
I am not writing this text to tell the world how I struggled under the communist regime. I really didn’t. Being told by your headmaster what to study is nothing compared to what people in the GDR experienced in Bautzen, the main spot for political prisoners. I am writing this to share my reflection on my career.
Maybe I would have ended up focused on User Experience anyway — even if my headmaster hadn’t insisted on that early career twist, I don’t know. But this is for sure: If I had been right in the middle of socialist journalism studies when the wall came down, stepping into the free media landscape would have been a lot harder.
title photo showing the KC 85
Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stiefkind/15272234830
