Publications

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.

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.

A design system is a collection of documented elements that embody the design principles and rules of an organization. They also typically include reusable components and patterns (typography, color palettes, form elements, etc.) that designers and developers can use to efficiently create uniform and consistent user interfaces (UIs) across an organization’s suite of digital products. Although design systems are increasingly common in industry, few academic programs are teaching students about design systems. In this Master Class, we will present a model for teaching design systems that is meant to be flexible and scalable to a variety of educational contexts. Attendees will come away with a deeper understanding of what design systems are and where they came from and ideas for how they can incorporate design systems into their teaching practice.

While accessibility is acknowledged as a crucial component in design, many technologies remain inaccessible for people with disabilities. As part of a study to better understand UX practice to inform pedagogy, we analyzed 58 interview sessions that included 65 senior user experience (UX) professionals and asked them “How do you consider accessibility in your work?” Using transitivity analysis from critical discourse analysis, our findings provide insight into the disparate practices of individuals and organizations. Key findings include the growing role of design systems to structurally address accessibility, and the range of organizational strategies, including dedicated teams. We also found that the categories of accessibility consideration were somewhat superficial and largely focused on vision-related challenges. Additionally, our findings support previous work that many practitioners did not feel their formal education adequately prepared them to address accessibility. We conclude with implications for education and industry, namely the importance of implementing and teaching design systems in human-computer interaction and computer-science programs.

One of the most important emerging trends in the field of user experience (UX) is the creation and use of design systems, which are a collection of documented elements that embody an organization’s design rules and principles. While design systems are becoming ubiquitous among organizations, especially those with mature design practices, few academic programs teach students how to use or create them. In this experience report, we share details on how we incorporated design systems into assignments and courses in three different academic programs. In this experience report, we provide a definition of design systems and introduce a scalable and flexible model for teaching them. We reflect on our motivations, insights, and lessons learned from implementing this model.