From the course: Careers in Web Design and Development

User experience (UX) careers

From the course: Careers in Web Design and Development

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User experience (UX) careers

- Have you ever visited a website and thought wow, I have no idea how to start and I have no idea where to find anything? Or have you thought, there must be a better way to streamline this process? If so, you're flexing your user experience muscles. User experience, or UX, is the planning portion of website and application development. In other words, what are the goals of the company and the users, and what do they want to achieve? Who is this for in terms of the target audience? How are they accomplishing this goal now? How can we improve that process? User experience professionals often spend their time talking with lots of people. They develop an understanding of what their company or their client wants to accomplish. They identify target audiences, understanding in detail who wants this product, including demographics, psychographics, technical levels, where they're performing the task, and with what type of electronic device? They'll figure out website organization, including how the navigation is organized, and which links go where, a field called information architecture. They may help in prototyping new interfaces via a process called wire-framing, where websites are drawn on paper, or in software at a very simple level. UX professionals recruit target audience members to participate in user testing, where prototypes are tested to make sure they're effective, meeting established goals for improvement. UX is a great place to start if you're a curious person who enjoys research and learning about all kinds of new fields. Some professionals have a background in psychology, or they're just interested in how people think. Those interested in website organization may have a background in library science. UX professionals are open-minded, ready to receive feedback from users and managers. They also have some strong opinions about what makes users happy and what makes a great interface, but they're also ready to let those opinions go if testing shows that they're wrong. In terms of software, there's not much. Many UX professionals work with the usual Microsoft Office or G Suite applications, like word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software. They may use software for prototyping, like Adobe XD, Sketch or prototyping tools like Envision, Balsamic, or Moqups. Finally, UX professionals are a huge fan of the humble sticky note. They're useful for all kinds of organization in naming projects that they might be involved with. If UX sounds like the right kind of field for you, or if you'd like to learn more, LinkedIn Learning can get you started. The Become a User Experience Designer learning path will give you much more detail about types of careers in this field, teach you career skills, and help you get your career started by helping you create a starter portfolio of your work. When you finish the learning path, you'll get a badge of completion. Use the overlay below to learn more about the Become a User Experience Designer learning path.

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