Thanks to all my institutional training and outside research, I like to believe I have an excellent understanding in Color theory, how to pair colors, and the selection of the color palettes depending on the meanings as well as what they would represent towards a project.
During my education, I've learned there are two types of accessibility: Physical & digital. Interior Architecture has taught me much about egress, safety codes, and general ergonomics, but my time in the UX/UI bootcamp opened my eyes to what it means to be accessible online. Especially with new disabilities & conditions popping up every day, it is very important to me to create sensible, innovative applications & websites so that everyone can feel included and easily find what they are looking for.
By the end of January 2024, I can now understand and communicate through Javascript, HTML, and CSS with others. In the future, I hope to continue honing in my newfound coding skills and improve them so I can better my own work as well as aid anyone around me on a project.
Design Communications is something I primarily focused on at my time in university. The art of being able to communicate ideas, meanings, and showing how something works without having to verbally explain it to the user is something I continue to think about every day, and that I find can make or break a design.
Having gone to school for a different type of architecture, IA to me is the fundamental structure of a website and without it, the site will collapse just like a building would. Having redone the Government Department for Health & Human Services in my bootcamp, I found that organizing the website through data & card sorting from my classmates helped lead to a much smoother & more positive experience for the end result.
Probably one of the biggest takeaways from the bootcamp was how to research credible, usable data, while considering details of bias or whether the candidates met the criteria for the target market. I thoroughly enjoyed this part of the course, because I do enjoy working with others, and setting up interviews and really getting to know the root issue for my users was very fulfilling towards creating a better solution for them.
Falling along the lines of accessibility, UI design was where I found I really got to shine. Having a design/art background sandwiched perfectly with the skills I took from the UX portion of the class. It allowed me to create functional, but visually beautiful websites in all sorts of screen dimensions and with responsive web design. Gestalt Laws & current iOS/android principles additionally helped guide me and keep me from overdesigning or doing too much/too little.
“Can users use my product?” That is the goal taken from usability testing. In my time, I conducted about 6-8 usability tests within my bootcamp, sometimes more than one per project if we had enough time to improve the product and get further information from I to improve it once more. This also helped introduce many different metrics as well as KPI’s.
To me, this was the exact equivalent of taking my 2d blueprints, to raising my designs into 3d models in college. Taking my designs from physical sketches, and slowly seeing them grow into usable, working prototypes through my continued research & data was always a very gratifying moment as an aspiring UX/UI Designer.
The emphasis that was put on us as students was always that we were going to have to work together to solve problems, especially in the real world. Even at my Luxury retail job, I work with my coworkers when I need help or have questions to close a sale. Same thing in college & the bootcamp; half of my projects were group projects from my bootcamp, and it was interesting to learn how others work and how we come together as 4 creative minds to come up with a solution to the problem together.
I find I’ve always been a very empathetic person, so learning it was a skill needed in UX/UI was exciting. What stands out about me would have to be my empathy learned through my time at Neiman Marcus. Unfortunately, as much as I have a lot of relationships with my best and most kind clients, we always get some that are not happy or very demanding. I’ve learned how best to diffuse situations and try to get to what the client wants while balancing as a representative for the company. Even if some days were hard, I still overall enjoy getting to make my clients happy with their purchases.
SCRUM Master, Project Manager, UI Lead; these were the roles I played in my group projects at bootcamp, and I loved each and all of them because I was able to find my voice but was still trying to work with the others in a harmonious, productive way. At Neiman Marcus, I’m the person my team turns to when they don’t understand the technology or need information on a shoe. In college, I took on many leadership roles in my sorority as well as the governing body for the sororities. Often time, I find myself volunteering to take on an effort to help achieve something because I know that my group will accomplish it.
Back in my high school days, I learned how to storyboard quite a lot. I was in animation & creative writing, and part of our projects or writing scripts would include having to storyboard out your plot or project., and it would have to be approved by the professors. I find those skills transferred quite fast here as storyboarding is prevalent to the creation of apps and sites to solve a user’s problem.
Sketching and doodling is something I’ve been doing since I was a baby. I knew how to use watercolors when I was 2 years old, and I remember a college lecturer saying to us that he appreciates those that doodle during class, because it helps retain more as well as helps to answer and think up more complex ideas, and that’s stayed with me since. I’ve done it in high school, college, and this bootcamp, and I don’t see it going away anytime soon.
I’ve been using computer software since I was 3 or 4 like Microsoft Suite, and like I mentioned in leadership, I’m the go-to for all questions tech-related majority of the time at work. I’ve been using many programs in Adobe Creative Cloud since high school (i.e., photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, etc.), and have solid knowledge in architectural programs like Google Sketchup, AutoCAD, Rhinoceros 3D, Lumion, and Revit. Now, I have expanded my proficiency & skills into Miro, Figma, Visual Studio Code, and GitHub.
