Research

Drawing on our collective experience as educators and preliminary results of an in-progress research study, we explore the complexities of integrating storytelling into Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) education. Within the user experience (UX) industry, storytelling is considered essential for collaborating, engaging stakeholders, and shaping professional identities. However, despite that importance, effectively teaching storytelling presents an unsolved educational challenge in HCI. We begin by examining storytelling’s multifaceted and elastic nature in UX practice and how that contributes to the challenge of teaching it, demonstrating key points with quotes and anecdotes from our ongoing research. We then discuss various pedagogical approaches to help students understand good storytelling, practice their storytelling skills, and better appreciate how storytelling can shape their academic and professional success. We hope that by sharing what we are grappling with as we investigate UX storytelling in practice, we can engage the EduCHI community in productive discussions to help us move our collective teaching practices forward.

In the field of user experience (UX), there is a wide range of skills that practitioners are expected to acquire and demonstrate as a competitive candidate for a job. Previous research identified three main skill categories of UX practitioners: technical skills, human skills, and dispositions. However, as educators, we have found that students often struggle to understand and incorporate the breadth of the skills they need into their learning and development. To help students identify, assess, and cultivate their skill sets, we designed a pedagogical intervention in the form of an ‘advance organizer’ that asks students to reflect on their initial and changing skill sets while enrolled in a UX-focused course. In this article, we present the basis of the intervention, including background on learning theories that supported its design. The intervention asks students to read and reflect on an academic article about the desired skills of aspiring UX practitioners, conduct an inventory of their existing and desired skill sets, and design a visualization to represent their current and future skill levels. We report on how the intervention was implemented in three different programs related to UX (one undergraduate, and two graduate programs). An analysis of the resulting assignments suggests the intervention was effective and valuable and helped give students a better sense of the range of skills required in industry. We conclude with considerations for implementing the intervention.