Why learn UX

Published on December 9, 2014

Benefits of UX training

Even if you have limited time and budget, there are still many benefits in enrolling in UX classes and learning UX design principles. Although you’ll be investing your time and budget in a UX course, there is a considerable return on investment to you and your employer for the training.

UX training reduces development time

As part of a UX course you’ll learn about the initial phases of development, and how you can gather information, test, and prototype your concepts to make sure they meet the needs of the user. This can occur before a single line of code is written. By completing plans and designs before coding, the UX process reduces development time, decreases both the number of revisions and the costs associated with a project. By finishing projects faster, they are able to get to market faster as well. UX classes help developers, designers, business analysts, and product managers to understand the importance of meeting the needs and expectations of the user that will be visiting a site or using an app.

UX courses help you improve user satisfaction

When you learn UX design principles and implement UX processes, you are able to build better products that meet the end-user’s needs, whether in the form of a website or app. By creating a website or app that is well-designed, you’ll also be creating something that is used more often, and provides a higher degree of satisfaction. This is because you’ll be meeting the needs of users that you’ve interviewed, reviewed prototypes with, and considered their viewpoint as you’ve created an app or website.

UX courses provide personal growth

Whether you are seeking to learn UX skills for personal satisfaction, to be more valuable to a current employer, or make yourself more attractive for a promotion or new job, user experience is a hot field and it is well worth receiving UX training for your own career goals.

About the author

Jennifer Smith is a user experience designer, Photoshop expert, educator and author based in Boston. She 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 credential from the UXQB.

Jennifer delivers UX training and UX consulting for large Fortune 100 companies, small start-ups, and independent software vendors. 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 the Microsoft Windows team to create educational material and deliver UX workshops to key partners globally on behalf of Microsoft. 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.