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How UX training can benefit your career
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Whether you work in marketing, sales or virtually any other sector of the modern workforce, there is little doubt that today's business environment is more competitive than ever. Many companies have transformed the way they do business thanks to the ubiquity of the mobile Web and the prevalence of mobile devices. Although these developments have yielded unprecedented opportunities for growth, consumers' tastes and expectations are higher than ever. User experience design, commonly known as UX, is one way to set your product or service apart from the competition. Here are just a few reasons why taking UX training can help benefit your career and your company.
Growing demand
In the past, companies took a similar approach to online services as they did for physical goods. Products had lengthy development cycles, and launch dates were often viewed in months or even years. Today, however, the advent of agile development and the rapid iteration process, particularly in the software industry, have changed all that. Organizations that want to remain on the cutting edge need to adapt to changes in the marketplace, and that has resulted in heightened demand for UX designers. Without an intuitive interface or means of interacting with your product, even loyal customers could turn elsewhere, resulting in lost sales.
Expanding existing skill sets
If you work in marketing, you already know how crucial feedback is to the success of a product or service. Fortunately, through UX design and multichannel marketing initiatives, designers can get near-instantaneous input on what works and what doesn't. These days, many companies are adopting a principle known as "lean UX," a concept that focuses on fast iteration of a product based on continually shifting feedback from users. By taking UX training, you'll not only learn the fundamentals of this essential aspect of design, but also how this knowledge can help you expand your existing skill set.
Similarly, lean UX design requires excellent interpersonal communication skills. Long gone are the days when designers had the luxury of finalizing a layout or feature before sending it off to production. Today's most successful teams work together at every step of the way to ensure that all business objectives are being addressed and that user feedback is taken into consideration. One of the main advantages of taking UX training is that the principles of UX can be applied to virtually any product or service, enabling you to bring more value to your organization and improve your career trajectory.
Proving worth
Almost all companies are focused on reducing unnecessary expenditure. As UX design can be applied to a wide range of products, you can prove your worth by minimizing waste. The sooner design is incorporated into a product development cycle, the less time, money and effort has to be spent in refining a design that may not work, or appeal to targeted demographics. By taking UX training at the American Graphics Institute, you can diversify your skill set and demonstrate that you can save your company time and money.
Thinking differently
In addition to teaching you real, demonstrable design skills, UX training enables you to develop your problem-solving skills. Good UX design is much more than how something looks - it's about how something works. By applying the principles of UX design to everyday tasks, you can work more efficiently, collaboratively and intuitively.
Regardless of whether you're a marketing professional, a product manager or a Web designer, UX training can help you take your career to new heights. When you have completed the training course in UX design, you'll be ready to further expand your skill set to make you an even better designer and a more valuable employee.
About the author
Jennifer Smith is a user experience designer, educator and author based in Boston. She has worked in the field of user experience design for more than 15 years.She has designed websites, ecommerce sites, apps, and embedded systems. Jennifer designs solutions for mobile, desktop, and iOT devices.
Jennifer delivers UX training and UX consulting for large Fortune 100 companies, small start-ups, and independent software vendors.She has served as a Designer in Residence at Microsoft, assisting third-party app developers to improve their design solutions and create successful user experiences. She has been hired by Adobe and Microsoft to deliver training workshops to their staff, and has traveled to Asia, Europe, India, the Middle East, and across the U.S. to deliver courses and assist on UX design projects. She has extensive knowledge of modern UX Design, and worked closely with major tech companies to create educational material and deliver UX workshops to key partners globally. Jennifer works with a wide range of prototyping tools including XD, Sketch, Balsamiq, Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Blend for Visual Studio. She also works extensively in the fields of presentation design and visual design.
Jennifer is also an expert on Photoshop, digital image editing, and photo manipulation. Having written 10 books on Photoshop, and having consulted and provided training to major media companies and businesses around the globe.
Jennifer is the author of more than 20 books on design tools and processes, including Adobe Creative Cloud for Dummies, Adobe Creative Cloud Digital Classroom, and Photoshop Digital Classroom. She has been awarded a Microsoft MVP three times for her work with user experience design in creating apps for touch, desktop, and mobile devices. Jennifer holds the CPUX-F certification from the User Experience Qualification Board and assists others in attaining this designation in leading a UX certification course at American Graphics Institute. She is a candidate for a Master’s degree in Human Factors in Information Design.