<aside> 👾 Christian Murphy is the CEO and founder of Eachday Health, a day-to-day gamified ADHD self-management app for adults. Christian is a CMU BXA alumni who studied Digital Art and Professional Writing with a focus on game design!
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I graduated from CMU back in 2016. I was a BXA major, so my focus was in Digital Art and Professional Writing. After graduating CMU I went on to work at the Google Creative Lab where I did research on the Pixel phone and Google Home. A lot of my work was interviewing people on the street, doing design work, and technical writing for interfaces and research pieces. I learned a lot about user experience like what information architecture is and how to think about how different things play into the UX team.
After Google I went on to work at a small design firm called Big Yellow Taxi, and I worked on a learning video game for kids called Hooked on Phonics. It was a small team, so I was able to learn the importance of being able to own your area and be the expert. From there I went to Fannie Mae where I did a lot more web design. I worked on traditional personas, and service design. It was slow work, but it allowed me to understand the nuances of the process and how to discover pain points. Then I went to Deloitte to work in their AI and analytics division. We were a specialized design practice that worked on how we take large datasets for analytics tools and bring smart AI into it.
Combining all of these experiences, the real goal with Eachday, the company I founded and am the CEO of, is to provide a tool that adults can use to track their day to day lives in a fun way to guide improvements across ADHD symptoms.
The way Eachday Health is set up is that it strengthens certain executive functions. Those are the parts of the mind that are underdeveloped in adults with ADHD due to a difference in cortical maturation. By the time you hit 25, the cortices have matured to the same level, but there’s a gap in executive function development. These are things like impulse control, organization, time management, etc. Those issues actually persist into adulthood for people who have ADHD.
I’ve always been interested in businesses for mental health, and mental health marketplaces for psychiatrists, therapists, and coaches was how we really started. I have ADHD, and I don't take medication. My youngest brother has a completely different type of ADHD and inattentive, low grade depression, but he doesn't take medication either. I asked my psychiatrist about this, and my psychiatrist just told me to go to therapy. I felt like this was a full circle because I already tried to do the therapist thing. I looked into other possible resources and there was actually nothing that existed, except for very localized in-person training that was about $400 to $500 an hour in San Francisco and Boston. A lot of entrepreneurship is luck, and I was lucky enough to meet a guy who had done years and years of this very expensive treatment. He was also interested in figuring out how we can digitize that and spread it to people who couldn't afford to do that or didn't live in major metropolitan areas.
The pros and the cons are probably the same in the sense that I know when things are working and when things aren't working. I have a strong conviction around what I think is going to work. I use that conviction and see if something works or not. On the other hand, one of the things that I would emphasize here is the need to continue to user test because ADHD is so personalized. The problem is most people who have ADHD don't know what type of ADHD they have. Because I’ve been working so closely to this, it's gotten to the point where I feel I know so much about the disorder. I think that knowing too much about the disorder is dangerous because it can be hard finding the right way to bring things to people with ADHD in a meaningful way without appearing as a medical entity even though I also have ADHD.
CMU is very organized in the sense of the prescriptive tasks you’re given and the railroad-like experience, but the real world isn't that clean. When you go into an organization, being a self-starter is really important. I think it’s a transition a lot of students coming out of CMU have to deal with. It can be hard to always understand all of the different pieces of a workplace quickly and be able to insert yourself in a way where you're adding something new rather than completing what needs to be done. I think that can be really difficult.
I think it's really important to spend as much time as possible in different areas of the school and not to get caught up in who this person is, what they’re studying, or how much they’re going to make after they get out of school, because it's surprising to see how everyone that comes into CMU ends up doing something pretty amazing. You're limiting yourself if you stick within your major, your sorority, or your fraternity. You really need to make sure that you put the effort to go into new places. Everyone here is very talented, and they all have something to teach you. You're doing yourself a disservice if you're not tapping into the overall network.
In terms of advice for people who are interested in going into this field professionally, I would say to diversify your skill set but have one hard skill that you can show off. When you sell yourself, focus on that one hard skill. That could be your user researcher, being able to do UI really well, or being an excellent writer. When you're talking to recruiters who are hiring, they're hiring for one specific role that's been lacking on their team. You won't know what that role is but being able to play to a strength in terms of one area that you are passionate about will help you stand out. And they'll keep you in mind if it's not now in the future when they need to fill that role.