Celebrate UX in Boston at User Experience Fair 2014
Related Class

Celebrate UX in Boston at User Experience Fair 2014

  • Published on
by Jennifer Smith
Celebrate UX in Boston at User Experience Fair 2014

The Boston community is participating in world usability day today with a user experience fair taking place at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development (NERD) center located just across the river in Cambridge. Senior staff from American Graphics Institute are serving as mentors providing portfolio and project reviews during the day, and also serving as panelists for UX discussions that are part of the event, which is hosted by the Boston chapter of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA).

UX designers, researchers, and managers from a variety of companies will beUX providing information about their roles, what they do as part of their work, and how they moved into the roles they currently hold. At the UX Fair there will be career advice available for those entering the field, switching jobs, or students who are considering entering the field of user experience design. There will also be networking sessions and one-on-one mentoring appointments.

The event brings together current practicing UX professionals from a cross-section of companies and academic institutions throughout the Boston area. Some of the user experience fields represented at the event include user experience designer, user research, information architecture, interaction design, user interface design, and usability testing.

As a part of a global event, titled World Usability Day, the 2014 theme is The Year of Engagement. The theme is fitting, because user experience is all about how products, apps, and websites engage with their users. Also, UX professionals must engage with a wide audience, from the intended audience of their products, through researchers, information architects, developers and engineers. Regardless of the field or type of product being created, user experience professionals engage with users as they determine their needs and seek to help make their tasks easier or more delightful. The same UX professionals often must engage with stakeholders to determine business needs or requirements. The UX professional will then take their knowledge of these factors and combined them with demographic and ethnographic information to make certain their work is well received by the intended audience regardless of where they are located around the globe.

If you are involved in the user experience community, or would like to be, hopefully you are participating in world usability day. If you are in the Boston area you can take part in the UX Fair, or participate in UX events around the globe. If you want to learn more about the field of user experience, you may find the UX classes and workshops at American Graphics Institute to be a good starting point in this field.

About the author

 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 holds a Master of Science (MS) degree in Human Factors in Information Design, a Bachelors degree with a concentration in Commercial Art. When not teaching at American Graphics Institute, Jennifer Smith is an adjunct professor at Boston University.

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.