The Center serves as an incubator for faculty-student research about the intersection of information, technology, and design, with an emphasis on creating better digital experiences for all users.
Current Research Projects
User Experience Capacity-Building (UXCB)
How can organizations better understand and strengthen their UX practices?
UX Education
How can we better prepare students for UX careers?
HCI Education Community of Practice
How can we build a community of practice for HCI/UX educators?
Past Research Projects
Online Museum Collections and UX
How can we improve the user experience of online museum collections?
Evaluating the Usability of Museum APIs
How can museums make collection APIs more user-friendly?
Our Latest Publications
Building User Experience (UX) Capacity to Support Digital Transformation: A Case Study of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Full Paper
MacDonald, Villaespesa, Kingberg, Kisicki, and Jackson (2023)
To take full advantage of the potential offered by the digital space, museums and cultural institutions must be able to consistently apply User Experience (UX) methods to create enjoyable and understandable digital interfaces. Unfortunately, many of these organizations lack the resources and in-house expertise to consistently and effectively apply UX methods when designing (or re-designing) their digital products and related services. Our solution to this challenge is to engage in UX Capacity-Building (UXCB), a process through which any organization can gradually create a more UX-friendly culture and build a sustainable and effective internal UX practice. In this paper, we present a case study of implementing a UXCB initiative for Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, over a nine-month period. We provide a detailed description of our UXCB process, an analysis of how our work impacted the museum’s UX capacity, and reflections about the applicability of our model to other museums and cultural organizations.
EduCHI 2023: 5th Annual Symposium on HCI Education
Workshop/Symposium
Gray, C. M., MacDonald, C. M., Lallemand, C., Oleson, A., Carter, A. R. L., St-Cyr, O., and Pitt, C. (2023)
EduCHI 2023 will bring together an international community of scholars, practitioners, and researchers to shape the future of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) education. Held as part of the CHI 2023 conference, the one-day symposium will feature interactive discussions about HCI educational research, pedagogical innovations, teaching practices, and current and future challenges facing HCI educators. In addition to providing a platform to share pedagogical strategies and continue to build a scholarly knowledge base for HCI education, EduCHI 2023 will also provide opportunities for HCI educators to learn new instructional strategies and deepen their pedagogical knowledge.
Developing a Faculty-Led, Student-Driven UX Consultancy and Research Lab to Support HCI Teaching and Learning
Full Paper
MacDonald, C. M., & Villaespesa, E. (2023)
Integrating real-world projects into courses has long been a common feature of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) education, as they are a proven method for building HCI students’ knowledge, skills, and confidence. However, the rapid growth of the User Experience (UX) profession has led to increased enrollment in practice-oriented HCI programs while simultaneously introducing a variety of specialties within the industry. As a result, educators are confronted with the unique challenges of (1) providing learning experiences that offer students practical experience with various design and research methods and (2) providing enough of those experiences to support increasingly large cohorts of students. In this paper, we describe one institution’s efforts to address these challenges by developing an education-focused research center devoted to coordinating and facilitating a variety of course-based partnerships for graduate-level UX students.