My curiosity about the UX world stemmed from my time serving as a finance soldier in the U.S. Army. We were stuck using software from the 1970s—glitchy, unintuitive, and filled with green text straight out of The Matrix. There were no instructions, making even simple tasks unnecessarily difficult.
Frustrated, I reached out to friends working as UX designers, and they introduced me to the creative problem-solving behind digital experiences. I quickly realized how transformative UX design could be for workplaces like mine.
Without any formal UX knowledge, I took matters into my own hands. I used Excel to streamline workflows in our finance office, then built web pages to simplify common questions. Eventually, I designed a prototype to digitize the Army's leave request process—an application that, unbelievably, is still submitted on letter-sized paper.
Now, as a graduate student at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, studying User Experience Research and Design, my goal is to refine my research and design skills to create intuitive, user-friendly solutions that make a real impact.
