Why I am in UX

I graduated from CUNY College of Staten Island in 2022 with a B.s. in Computer Science, with most of my formal education being in back-end software development. My junior year, I decided to try my hand at front-end, and took a web development course. For our final project, we were tasked with designing a website prototype, exclusively designed and written with HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap. This was the eye-opener for me. While aesthetics were a priority, I cared more about the flow. How a user would interact with the site, where buttons, modals, and information should be that would create the best experience for a potential user. While this wasn’t a requirement of the project, I chose to send my prototype to friends and colleagues to gather feedback, both positive and negative, and I took the pain points that I received and reworked my site to better meet the needs and wants of users. I wanted to create something user centric, something that doesn’t just look clean, but takes into account the user’s experience with the site. This was the experience that solidified UX as something I wanted to pursue full-time.

My Experience

My most recent experience was an incubator project that I had worked on with a colleague for a little over a year, called “Haven”, which was a virtual pride and information center for the LGBTQIA+ community. We were tasked with building a “company” from the ground up, and my workload covered the technical side. As a project manager, I worked with my team to meet our timeline goals for development, ranging from wireframing, research, testing, UX/UI design, and back-end development. Apart from broadening my skills on UX design and research, it also gave me the experience of working with and managing a wonderful team, and balancing user-centricity with logistics and the goals/reach of our “company”.

In my free time, I’ve worked on ideas and concepts to practice user-centric design, and have also completed courses/certifications on Udemy and Coursera to gain new insights from various teachers and mentors on UX, human-computer interaction (design, testing, and research), and the importance of user-centricity and accessibility in our work.

Skills

Design tools: Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, XD, ProCreate, Figma, and Balsamiq.

Languages and Frameworks: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, C++, C, C#, Java, and I am familiar with MySQL.

Software/Other: Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, GitHub, GitBash, Ubuntu, Eclipse, Unity, Google Drive, and Microsoft Office.