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Jessica Becker '16 is a graduate and an adjunct faculty member for the UX master’s program in the iSchool, emphasizing the importance of accessibility to her students.

Before coming to Kent State, Becker worked in a variety of design roles at companies such as Medical College of Ohio, Speciality Sports Venture, Denver Newspaper Agency and Jockey International.

“The first time I heard about UX was while I was working for Jockey in their e-Commerce Department,” Becker said. “It was 2008 at the time and we were interviewing users to get an understanding of what they did on our sites.”

At the time, there was no specific industry on what was being done at Jockey, Becker noted.

“We were doing AB testing on things,” Becker said. “It was just part of the job.”

From there, Becker became a senior web designer at Northwestern University, allowing her to attend conferences about UX and grow her knowledge about the field. This also led Becker to the UX master’s program in the iSchool.

“I wanted to learn more about how I could apply UX to all things, not just web design,” Becker said.

During her master’s program, Becker learned about the role customer experience plays in the UX field.

“I learned about Human-Computer Interaction and the research side of UX, something I was not doing when I started,” Becker said. “These all filled in the gaps in my experience.”

Becker is using the same principles she learned from her master’s program to stress the importance of accessibility to her students.

With her experiences at Northwestern University and Case Western Reserve University, Becker is familiar with the importance of accessibility in the education field.

“I can walk them through elements such as headers and tags so they have an understanding of what that looks like on the back end and how that ties to physical design,” Becker said.

In addition to the accessibility course, Becker has taught Information Architecture I & II, Usability, Interaction Design I & II, as well as the portfolio classes.

“Accessibility is easy to work into interaction design because students are creating visual prototypes,” Becker said. “Same with information architecture, as students are creating categories and structures and making sure that they’re using purposeful lanes.”

Teaching online courses can be challenging for professors, as they don’t receive the normal face-to-face interaction they would get with an in-person class. Becker is facing this challenge head-on by creating a space to encourage students to network.

“I wanted to create a space for students to network, ask questions outside of the curriculum and get their questions answered,” Becker said. “My goal is to help students stand out in a crowd of many who want to go into UX.”

Students who want to stand out as they go into the UX field should also continue to educate themselves on things outside of it, Becker emphasized.

“The students who are connecting with people on LinkedIn, picking up books about UX or looking at articles about UX are doing things that will help advance where they want to go in their career.”

Aside from teaching, Becker serves as the UX manager for Mutual of Omaha, working to educate other company teams about the importance of UX.

“There’s a lot of education and teaching to make sure that people have an understanding of what our team does,” Becker said. “We want them to understand the value that UX can bring to all of the projects they work on.”