In this piece, I use the experience of a summer job wrangling horses in Colorado to begin a thought exercise about app design. What started as a dusty, hands-on job turned into an unexpected lens for exploring user experience. I began by identifying a real-world problem I encountered on the ranch, gathering informal data from people around me, and breaking the challenge down into small, design-able pieces. The result? A fictional app concept—and a deeper appreciation for how UX thinking can emerge from even the most unlikely contexts.

Many creative process share commonalities, and this is true for painting and UX design. In this thought piece, I explore the similarities in creating a painting and the UX design process through my own experiences with both.