If you’re interested in creating a UX course for your university, company, or another type of organization, please check out my slides for a workshop I just hosted for the Symposium on Communicating Complex Information, Designing a UX Course: Where Do I Get Started? I provide lots of resources for anyone teaching a UX course for the first time or looking to improve their approach to teaching UX.
Why Should We Care About Teaching UX?
User experience design (UX) is only going to grow in importance as organizations ranging from large corporations to K-12 schools seek to provide consumers with digital products and services that make their lives easier. All of these technologies need to be usable, useful, and engaging. And if they aren’t? They will fail their users, cost the organization money, and possibly also damage its reputation. As demand increases for UX expertise, students and other pre-professionals will need to skill up in this emerging area.
Creating a UX Course? Here’s What You Need to Know
- Most People Don’t Know What UX Is: You need to give learners a framework for understanding what UX is and what it helps people do. This includes defining the key concepts of UX, such as usability, user research, information architecture, content strategy, and visual design.
- Practice Makes UX: At the same time, you don’t want to introduce learners to UX in theory only. UX is a verb. It’s something you do. Make sure that learners get lots of practice in the UX methods you’re introducing them to.
- Design, Test, Refine: Each UX skillset that you feature in your course should invite your learners to make something, test that something out, and then refine it. You can do worse than to have learners redesign an existing website or other digital application over the course of a semester, applying a variety of UX methods along the way.
Cite The Presentation (APA)
Getto, G. (2020). Designing a UX course: Where do I get started? A workshop for the 9th Annual Symposium on Communicating Complex Information, Norfolk, VA.
Need More Help?
Feel free to contact me if you’d like to arrange a webinar or workshop for your organization.