Melanie’s Spice Site: My Path to UX Design
By: Melanie Ogunwale
Tags: Women in STEM, About Me, Designer, Women In Tech, Origin Stories

From a WebTV hobby to the 2020 Pandemic Apocalypse, my personal journey on pursuing a career in design.

My desire to design a website dedicated to the Spice Girls, my middle school pop idols, was where my passion for design began! Image Credit

In February of 2020 I sat with my friends in the San Francisco’s Dolores Park. I felt a stressful gnawing: that I’m not in the right place in my life. So many factors brought me here but I began asking around:

What kind of work can I do in tech that is visual, creative, and works with people? How can I take the skill sets of a teacher and turn it into a tech lifestyle? My friend Anna, said, “You would make a great UX Designer and you should look into it.” 💁🏻‍♀️

Some time after, I experienced a gnawing feeling turned into a headache. Not just a headache, a migraine. Then an all out sickness. A fever. 🤒 An I’m-in-bed-for-three-days-in-a-way-I’m-not-so-cool-with type of sickness. Here I thought, wow I’m done. I can’t do stress like this any longer! In that moment I decided that it was time to finally do something about that gnawing feeling. I told my husband: “I’m done with teaching, I’m changing my life!” He looked at me like…”Wow that’s some fever. No really Mel, are you ok?” 🤷🏿‍♂️

But I wasn’t okay. I had Covid-19!!! I would have it for another full month. I also had twelve years of being chewed up with people work. There is no denying: teachers and social workers don’t get a fair shake at things and it’s in the nature of the work.

Because it isn’t valued, teaching in the US can be a demanding profession. This video shows how the US compares to other places in the world.

Looking back in time, I had a lot of passion for design. Early on, I would sit for hours fiddling on the early 90s versions of computers with the green and black screens. I had fun inputing what I could and sitting around watching older kids crack the codes. Numbers pouring down the screen like waterfalls.

I KNEW I was a designer when I was eleven. It was 1996 and they came out with WebTv. Since my parents couldn’t shell out for a desktop computer, this was the next best thing. I would surf the web and discover all there was to the World Wide Web. So much media that I couldn’t have found otherwise. I picked up the hobby of compiling all my favorite webpages into WebTv’s folders.

Things ramped up when we got a keyboard for Christmas, instead of toggling arrows on a TV remote, I could type! ⌨️ Super big deal. I ended up finding Express Page one of the first made for the public web builders. I would obsess over details, I would scour the web for content. What was my site about?

The Spice Girls! It was named “Melanie’s Spice Site.”

I don’t know what I liked more; the Spice Girls as artists with their fashion and attitude or obsessing over details and picking up on what my guests wanted to know. I had intensely researched my subject and worked my best to present to them. I had facts, quotes, pictures, rainbow animated borders, a subtle sparkling star background, spinning bullet points, Spice Girl midi music (keyboard synthesizer tunes) would play in background. Each page was slightly different but within the theme. It was my world. Every time a new widget was found or a better version of a guestbook was discovered it was a priority to get it to my site. I had a page counter of thousands, an accomplishment. My guestbook quickly filled, I got my site listed on huge sites. I even had haters: “YOUR NAME ISN’T MELANIE, YOU ARE FAKING IT!” I laughed. 😂

“If You Wannabe My Lover” by the Spice Girls: Mel C, Mel Z, Emma, Victoria, Geri on the steps of St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel in London

It kinda is my name though. 🤨 But this was the internet. Not much has changed. We just made variations of the same avenues. Creating favorite content, strangers saying all sorts of silly things, building versions of entertainment that keeps us glued. In that time I had mastery of HTML (probably sloppy as all heck), beginnings of Java and tried other platforms like Angelfire and GeoCities. WebTv had a built in playlist of midi files you could play in the background while you worked. 🎶 With hits like “Tasty Wav”, and the “Ragtime Dance” where could a kid go wrong?!

Years later I no longer had a WebTv, I had pen and paper and lots of time to myself, more than I would have liked. ✍️ Life became complicated and confusing. So here I learned to be a story teller to make my own world when things were tough. I wrote a 2-hundred-some page book at age twelve. I still have it in my closet. Most of the story was a varied mish mash of TV sitcoms, memories of playing Tomb Raider with my cousin, and precisely what I would put in my dream home. I was the problem solver now and writing stories was a way to focus my own narrative and retain joy in my childhood.

I still have my story stored away.

Time went on and I landed myself in a rural town for high school. Here I really connected with my computer science teacher. She recognized my passion for design. She is one of three teachers that I can remember advocating and challenging me with multiple opportunities. She let other teachers in on my talents and together they kept handing me more and more things to do. My extracurricular time in high school was where I applied myself to escape my inner reckonings. The opportunities were an escape.