Toward a Model of UX Education: Training UX Designers Within the Academy

What I read

In this article, the authors work to fill what they perceive is a gap of practical knowledge concerning user experience education in higher education. They offer suggestions on how to introduce these topics, and ways to structure the topics inside of an academic institution.

First, the authors describe that the field of user experience is growing rapidly, but there has not been an equivalent growth in academia. They note that this text, which they describe as a tutorial, will be based on the collective experience of the authors, one of whom has worked in industry since 1998 and, through a program he created at his company, has “produced 8 full-fledged UX designers to date.”

Next, the authors perform a literature review, which they acknowledge was limited because there are limited articles to include, and because the authors focused on readings that they found useful when teaching UX to students and trainees. They also completed “several rounds of keyword searches”, and identified “precious few works.” The works that they selected were based on four concepts that they felt were relevant, which they describe in the next section. They also indicate that they will include research with institutions in the work, stating that “we chose to review three program websites in depth: the University of Washington, Bentley University, and Kent State University. We selected these three programs based on their proximity to the field of technical and professional communication and their development as programs in UX that fit the core competencies from literature on UX education, as evidenced by a review of their programs’ websites.”

The authors describe the four key concepts. The first focuses on competencies that a program should include, and they begin by describing a definition of user-centered design. The authors explain that, in UX work, practitioners pull from many professional practices and approaches. They next describe four pedagogical parts of an approach to teaching UX. These include orientation, observation, practice, and play. During observation, students watch practitioners, and during practice, they use the method on a real project. The third concept is described as apprenticeship, which they indicate is based on the professor’s experience working as a practitioner, and putting students in “realistic situations” that “at least mirror, if not replicate, the situations they will find outside the classroom.” The last concept, curriculum, is not included.

Next, the authors describe key lessons they have learned in their own experiences. The first is how to justify a new program in UX; they recommend showing that there are new needs of employers, new course offerings, and the ability to better market existing programs. The second lesson indicates core competencies that user experience education should include, and they again state the need for a diverse set of building blocks and real-world experience. They describe that “the focus of UX is production.” Last, they describe that UX education can be integrated into some courses through “Role plays,” where instructors act as clients. They indicate that the three websites they explored include apprenticeship programs, and that projects internal to an institution can also be used for student work. The fourth lesson is how to launch a stand-alone project, and they conclude that interdisciplinarity is critical. The fifth lesson describes barriers a school might encounter in creating a new program. They describe that these barriers are “topics we have already touched on.”

What I learned

What I learned and what I think

This article indicates that, at least based on the authors’ limited experiences, a UX course should be based heavily on real-world projects. These might come through actual projects with industry, simulated projects that might work the same in practice, or projects internal to the educational institution (like redesigning a website.) I completely agree. The more real projects students get to work on, the more they learn about the realities of how design work is done. They lose the idealism, temper the “I have a hammer and everything is a nail” approach to usability, build depth into what is almost always a shallow process, realize that methods don’t solve things, produce portfolio work that doesn’t suck, receive incomplete and contradictory feedback, work under deadlines that are usually ridiculous…. and on and on. This, more than anything, is probably what led towards the creation of this article—that Beecher’s apprenticeship model at his company was successful because the trainees were working on real projects.

The methods used in the article were throw-away, as none of them had any real rigor. Most of the rest of the paper was thin. The tone sort of wavered between academic language (and what seemed to be a goal of being taken seriously in the IEEE publication), and practitioner language, which is really where the majority of the useful content came from. I’m not entirely sure why this article lives in an academic, peer reviewer journal. This probably could have been a successful blog post, at about ¼ the length, and I think that would have been of service to practitioners and to educators. As it is now, it’s redundant.

The shelf-life of these things is fascinating to me. This is from 2016. There is still no meaningful body of scholarly work in this topic, but the industry has already gone through its most notable boom and bust. If I were standing up a new design program in an educational institution, I would distance myself as much as possible from “UX”, particularly if I had a set of vocational outcomes for my students in mind.