Brandeis Online

User Design controls every aspect of our lives. How we turn on music in the car on our way to work. How we take notes for meetings. How we navigate our phone to call home that we’re running late. Even the curvature of a spoon in our late-night dessert. It all has a purpose, a team of one to thousands dissecting every detail so that you can have that very moment, exactly as they’ve planned to best fit your needs and sell their product.

Popularly called UX, user experience design skills are valuable across industries, far beyond traditional design roles. App, website, and device markets continue to grow exponentially, creating intense competition and the need for user experience design specialists across nearly all industries. A recent study on LinkedIn ranked UX design fifth on its top 10 list of hard skills companies needed most for 2020. Demand is only expected to increase.

“Before the UCD master’s program, I might have engaged in problem-solving subconsciously, but I never knew why I made the choices I did. Now, I’m a lot more aware of the reasoning behind my designs — and I have facts and data to inform each decision I make,” says Gabriele Burke MS’24.

Ultimately, Gabriele says that her “journey from graphic design to UX design through the GPS program has been transformative.” Now with her degree, Gabriele continues to use her new knowledge and skills to transform her company with a user-focused approach.

Here are some of the ways UX might come in handy in your industry:

Project Management

How do you manage a project without understanding the core product? You can’t. Over the last decade, user experience has become a key driving force in successful product development. A knowledge of user experience can help project managers understand user needs and prioritize tasks effectively. It helps to define product requirements, which leads the development process and ensures user satisfaction.

Branding and Marketing

Understanding your target audience is the first step of any marketing plan. Not only who do you attract, but who do you want to attract? Who are you writing for? How do they act? Understanding user behavior and preferences used in user-centered design to optimize user experience is crucial for this process. 

That’s why the UCD course RUCD 101: User Experience Design is included as part of the required curriculum for the Digital Marketing and Design MS. To become a master of marketing and design, you need to understand not only how the consumer thinks but how to translate those preferences and ideologies into product design and experience.

Data Analytics

Companies across industries require data analytics for processing data crucial sets and extract meaning from raw data to support better decisions, predictions, and actions. Not everyone has this ability to break down data sets and visualize outcomes. That’s why this role is so important, to translate information for more action-oriented leadership roles. That’s why UX design is so important in data analytics. Presenting your data findings is just as important as the analysis itself. If you can’t translate, how can anyone understand?

That’s why we offer RUCD 160: Information Visualization as part of the User-Centered Design program at Brandeis Online. Students in this class gain an understanding as to how humans visually perceive and make inferences from data graphics. They will experiment with various data models, graphical conventions, and tools as they design, innovate and evaluate data visualizations.

Accessibility and Inclusive Design

Digital technologies have the potential to make our lives better in a number of ways. However, the benefits of websites, software and other products become limited when they are not inclusive and accessible to all.

In a variety of industries, UX skills can be used to ensure that products and services are accessible to people with disabilities. This is not only important for general accessibility, expanding your product market to the full range of consumers.

That’s why we created the Digital Accessibility Master’s Certificate, as part of our User-Centered Design department. Its curriculum prepares you to create digital products that meet diverse user needs. In addition to gaining a deep knowledge of accessibility standards and best practices, students learn how to apply universal design principles and address ethical and legal considerations in digital design.

At Brandeis Online, our students study at the intersection of psychology, creativity and technology. While other programs focus primarily on design aesthetics, we explore the science of human behavior to gain a deeper understanding of UX and engagement principles. 

Our leading practitioners in the UX field will teach you to incorporate design thinking, agile development, and other industry trends into your work, present your designs with evidence-based rationales, and collaborate with product owners, managers, and other internal stakeholders.

Interested in a smaller way to add UX knowledge to your repertoire? You can take up to two Brandeis Online  courses without officially enrolling in a degree program. Fill a professional skill gap or explore an academic interest with no commitment. 

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To learn more about the master’s degree and certificate programs within our User-Centered Design department, please visit our website.