At Mozilla, I’ve written thirty technical articles, something I already knew how to do prior to the Outreachy internship. This has been tremendously helpful as practice and as experience. I’ve been able to post several articles to this portfolio. But I’ve also learned three new things at Mozilla: UX, User Testing, and SEO.

I had heard the term, UX, constantly at tech-based networking events and on the Internet, but I wasn’t sure what it was or how to use it. My mentor, Joni, sat me down and taught me all about UX Heuristics. I learned a lot from this article she sent me. Then we went to put UX as well as User Testing into practice. We researched what users were having trouble doing and navigating on Mozilla Support. Many of them couldn’t see the essential training documents for Mozilla Support, so we storyboarded ways to make the articles visible on the Mozilla website.

We also User Tested the Mozilla Articles I had been writing. I wrote the same article in three formats: as a SUMO article, as a Google Slide, and as a video. Users on Usertesting.com found my SUMO article to be impeccable and my Google Slides to be a disaster. My video received mixed reviews. This taught me a valuable lesson that everyone in any business needs to know. Ready to hear it? It’s big: Mistakes are not failures when you test them in minor experiments with small groups. They only become failures when you show them off to all your users and customers.

In addition to User Testing and UX, I also learned about SEO. I had been writing content for years, but I had been confused as to how to apply SEO principles. Joni explained SEO strategies to me. They’re pretty simple. Find keywords you know are important to your subject and use them in your article. Use them most frequently at the beginning of the article and in the search results summary. Test words and phrases on Google Trends. If your article has a results search summary, using keywords there is especially crucial.

Outreachy has given me more practice, experience, and learning than I could imagine and I have loved every minute of it.