Before Google and UX

Jay received her Bachelor’s degree from the University of New South Wales, where she studied Computer Science and Digital Media. Human computer interaction was a particular interest of hers, which started from an early stage when she started building websites from the age of 10 years.

Her dive into Yahoo! Geocities and Neopets, gave way to designing and coding websites with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Coupled with her interest in graphic design, filming and photography, Jay was interested in user experience even before she knew that such a field existed.

From there she started her own design company, where she was both UI designer and Front End Engineer.

Jay: “We were designing not just websites, but proprietary software for companies similar to BestBuy. Phone companies, radio companies, electronic companies — we’d be designing the internal systems that they used. For instance, one of the things we designed was a program that would monitor the phone records of big companies with 10,000 employees or more. They would get all the phone records for their employees, stores and locations. The program would separate out everyone’s bills and flag any kind of inconsistencies like, a calls from a store location at night time when it should not to be making those.”

At the end of 2012, Jay joined Google where she worked on Google+ Photos and Hangouts before coming to Project Fi.