Feleesha Sterling Designs Her Experience as UX Researcher & Entrepreneur
Written by Meg Seitz · Photography by Julia Fay
There’s design. And then there’s design. Feleesha Sterling is focused on the latter.
As owner of Quick Usability, Sterling is not only in the business of UX research, strategy and design – she’s in the business of people.
“UX is not just about the wireframes and the documentation,” she says. “It’s really about making better products that people want to use. It’s finding ways to drive to the core understanding and expectations of your users and balancing that with the resources, tools, time and team that are available to execute.” {Continued below}
For anyone coming up the curve on the term UX, you probably know it – and you don’t even know it. UX, or user experience design, is the way in which designers enhance and improve a product’s usability or accessibility, so that a customer will absolutely love how they interact with the product.
In that sense, UX is a product’s story. And there’s no one better to tell it than Sterling.
“UX is not just about the wireframes and the documentation,” she says. “It’s really about making better products that people want to use.”
Originally from Jamaica, Sterling came to the U.S. for college, pursuing a B.A. in Journalism from East Tennessee State University. She was always a fan of print journalism, but knew the industry would need to go digital which is why she chose to pursue an M.A. in Interactive Media from Quinnipiac University. It was there that she fell in love with UX design. It was a more of a natural transition from journalism than you’d initially think.
“Journalism and UX are both places where the creator of the message – whether story or design – must always remember to prioritize the audience over themselves or even the media that they are using,” she shares. “I have always been intrigued by that challenge. It’s so obvious – but also not.”
The challenge was so intriguing that after years of working in UX design, strategy and research for more corporate accounts, Sterling decided to start building Quick Usability as her own company last summer. She also set out to put her on spin on how she designed her company’s approach to the field. She wanted to be able to do the work she loves faster; and, in turn, help people build more usable products easier and more efficiently.
“Quick Usability was born out of the frustration of focusing on processes instead of people which can sometimes be a part of UX in large companies,” she states. “Although methodologies and processes are important – and I love them myself – I strongly believe that there are ways to get to actionable and useful insight without a lot of the politics and processes that can be part of bigger companies.”
“Quick Usability was born out of the frustration of focusing on processes instead of people which can sometimes be a part of UX in large companies”
With all that said, Sterling is investing time right now defining her own product and processes; she’s also preparing for City Startup Labs Demo Day in March. She is a member of the City Startup Labs Center of Excellence’s Class of 2017, an organization that provides opportunities for African American millennials to learn how to research, plan, launch and operate their own business ventures.
With Quick Usability, Sterling is proving very quickly that she can design not only her own business, but also her own experience as both UX researcher and entrepreneur.
Meet the Author: Meg Seitz is the Founder and Managing Creative Partner of toth shop, an agency with one goal: Elevate your brand’s content through powerful writing, creativity, and strategy. She also serves as an Adjunct Professor with Queens University and Founding Partner of the children’s book series, “Bea is for Business”.
She’s an English major with an MBA, so she can talk Homer’s “The Odyssey” just as well as she can talk sunk costs – though she’d much prefer the former.
Meet the photographer: Julia Murray, owner of Julia Fay Photography, feels most at home behind a camera with a story to tell on the other side. Her business began during her sophomore year of college, while majoring in radio and tv broadcasting. Now residing in Charlotte NC, she primarily shoots weddings and other local small businesses like her own. Her favorite part about her job is the connection it brings between art and people.
