Ensuring that I use solid usability standards can greatly help me in my future career, especially in the areas of website and application design. Being able to evaluate my designs for usability helps me create products that are both user-friendly and accessible. Having the ability to create efficient designs helps me gain status with future employers, who will know that I can help drive their brands toward success. In the current competitive job market, having sound usability standards for my designs can greatly help me pivot demand for my acquired user experience skillset.

Understanding the need for clear and consistent designs helps me reduce user frustration, which can negatively affect a brand’s message and bottom line. Creating user-friendly designs allows me to help garner a higher degree of expectation for the products I am designing and can lead to overall user satisfaction of them. Designing such that the consumer can not only effectively use, but also enjoy a product, can lead to higher engagement for the brands I help design. As a current graphic designer, I already know the value in creating something a user can enjoy, and this ideal carries through to my UX design career as well.

When I am creating websites, I know that effective navigation through sound information architecture, faster download speeds with optimized graphics, and overall usage of solid accessibility practices, help a site rate well against WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). These universal guidelines help a website (or app) have a broader audience reach by allowing more patrons to be able to effectively use their site. This smoother user experience can lead to higher conversion rates for the brand and better overall user retention of the product.

By performing a usability evaluation, through methods such as a cognitive walkthrough, a heuristic evaluation, or through (moderated or unmoderated) user testing, usability issues can be detected earlier, which will save the brand wasted money and time through efficiency. This adeptness helps to minimize revisions, which can be very cumbersome for a brand later in the development cycle. This productivity helps strengthen a team by allowing their resources to be used more effectively and with less friction from issues that may arise in development. As a member of a team, being conscientious of our productivity can only help ensure greater product demand and thereby create greater demand for my designs within those teams.

Early prototype testing can also be beneficial to communicate user needs more successfully. In my career, I may need to be able to advocate for the user across all stakeholders in a design cycle, from other designers to developers, and even marketers. Prototyping my designs can help detect poor usability before costly development has occurred and thereby help bridge the gap between the stakeholders and the product’s users. This passion to help create better products from the beginning will foster deeper demand for me as a user-experience designer.

When it comes to usability for my passion project, I hope to learn better how to effectively use Google Analytics. These insights in my newly coded blog website can help me see which pages are being utilized and which might not be as popular. They can help me analyze user behaviors and optimize my interface for more traction by my audience, or through evolution of my brand as needed. They will help me start to determine patterns which might lead to more proactive usability testing down the road. During the remainder of this course, I hope to cover more insight into tools such as Google Analytics, helping me understand how I can create better usability for my future projects and employers.

With the changing landscape of the tech industry, having a better understanding of usability can also help me market my skills to help brands evolve their future advancements. Interfaces are constantly changing and so are the users’ needs needed to operate them. Being able to help effectively design for future technologies such as VR, AI-driven tech, or even voice commanded interfaces, can help me bring modernized design into the hands of more users. Reducing the friction that occurs when new technology is unveiled, can help me strengthen my designs and encourage more need for them.

PLEASE FOLLOW ME as I embark on a quest to enjoy, learn from, and raise my little bamBEANos, in the best way this Mama Chickpea can. Art is my "balance" to life and I enjoy all the DIY therapy I can handle!

Artwork © copyright Shelly Arroyo, A.k.a. Mama Chickpea.