Designer Hangout started a little over four years ago. I started it back in college, actually. The first 2 years I studied computer science, and I liked a lot of aspects of that, but there were aspects I didn’t like. I didn’t like the programming part, which is a bit of a problem! But I really liked the collaborative part and the problem-solving part.

So after doing that for a few years, I knew I had to do something different. I heard about UX and at the time, thought I had to learn Photoshop - and that’s far from the truth, I’ve actually never used it in my job! So I found a mentor, started learning more about UX, and at the same time, I had a small network because I hadn’t worked in the industry before and was in college. This idea came to me about starting a Slack community. So I reached out to people through LinkedIn, added them to it, just to see where to goes I thought I’d have 20-30 people to ask UX questions to. And it snowballed from there. Slack got more popular for work, and growth took off.

JacobRogelberg