Technology can’t be better if we don’t make it better. Major kudos to you for taking the steps to become the person who can make that change happen.

As part of the team of Udemy instructors, I work on courses to help you level-up as a professional User Experience (UX) designer.

I’m on a mission to create...

- entertaining learning that you sail through,

- courses that deliver rock-solid strategies and top-tier techniques, and

- how-tos that are specific, actionable, and brimming with real-world examples.

But ultimately… I’m on a mission to turn YOU into an epic UX Designer.

From the trenches:

I work to improve the usability, accessibility, and overall glamour of websites, apps, and software. And I do this for a living. My job is to make outdated, ugly, usability messes into seamlessly flowing, delightful, user-friendly beauties. This has been my UX journey.

For many years I worked as a senior UX designer for a U.S. government contractor. My job was to use “UX magic” to craft beautiful, inclusively-designed, high-performing web applications for various military branches (e.g. Army, Air Force, Marines, Dept of Homeland Security, Dept of Defense, Centers for Disease Control). My team’s “magic tricks” worked. We brought UX to gov agencies that had never heard of it before. UX believers were born.

My UX journey has been full of lessons learned the hard way, real-world on-the-job challenges, and demanding boots-on-the-ground work. But also exciting experiences pitching innovation ideas to executives who were leagues above my rank, winning innovation awards & funding, and working with incredible teams of powerhouses on multi-million dollar projects that impacted millions of users.

What I love about UX is that it never stops developing; as I too am a lifelong student of UX. I believe in the mantra, "To become an expert, you must remain a student”.

I’m working to create courses that will level-up your expertise across the UX spectrum.

The repertoire I’d like to pass to you:

Iterative UX Research –

- UX strategy

- Lean UX, Agile UX

- User & business needs assessment

- User research & usability testing

- Compiling & communicating findings to decision-makers

- Pitching UX ideas, innovation ideas, or just UX in general

Iterative UX & UI Design –

- Information architectures

- Wireframes (sketches and digital)

- Mockups (visual UI design, storytelling, branding)

- Designing for accessibility (WCAG, Section 508, ADA, and others)

- Prototyping, responsive design, interaction design

- Living design systems / style guides

- Writing for the web

- Designer & developer collaboration

Which topic(s) would you like me to put at the top of my list to create a course about?

What’s different about my courses:

1. We redesign existing UIs together so you can see how to do it (I believe in showing not just telling).

2. Many “Ah-ha” moments — We look at existing designs, identify their problems, then you watch as we transform the designs using our best practices.

3. Extremely practical and specific — No high-level generalizations, or “it depends”, or plain theory.

4. Did I mention real-world examples? Yes, practical, from-the-field tricks.

5. Learn from real stories — Nothing sticks to the human brain better than stories. (Yay psychology!)

6. Each section ends with an “action summary” (a summary + checklist of action items) — It’s what I do to make my courses really actionable.

7. Get ready to be encouraged and uplifted the entire way — These courses are all about YOU and transforming you into the stand-out designer you’re destined to be.

How students describe me: “The passion of the instructor is contagious, the examples are on point and the explanations are great. I will definitely recommend this to my colleagues, thank you Liz” —Student, How to Design For Accessibility course

Be proud of yourself for exploring courses; you are taking concrete steps to level-up your expertise, broaden your skillset, and load up your toolbox. You’re going to stand out as a top-tier professional, leagues above others who stopped learning. And I’m delighted to be able to help you on this journey. Now let’s go learn something!

And never forget, the world needs you, go-getter.