Using an Experience Design Approach to Curriculum Creation

In this paper, we present the approach we took to the development of a new undergraduate major in human-centered design and development. The paper’s contributions are twofold: first, we illustrate how we adapted the user-centered design process and used it to help us create the vision, conceptual framework, and new curriculum. We hope that this process, lead by the development of a vision persona, can help other groups as they work to create new programs. Second, we present the vision and curriculum framework of the new major, which we offer as a step towards growing UX education in the US. Introduction Although the field of user-centered system design and its theoretical foundations have been established, some would argue, almost half a century ago, the profession has only taken off much more recently. In fact, user-centered design or user experience design (UX) is one of the fastest growing professions in the US right now. UX requires an interdisciplinary combination of skills ranging from psychology and anthropology to graphic design, computer science and engineering, and as such, employers have had a difficult time filling positions, since many typical graduates of computer science, engineering, or psychology lack an important portion of the skills required to engage in user-centered design. In fact, potential employees with the needed mix of interdisciplinary skills are so hard to find that industry professionals have deemed them “unicorns.” The UX unicorn is defined as “Mythical user experience designer with an advanced and adaptive skill range. Outstanding skills in graphic design, rapid prototyping, front end development, user testing, technical specifications, marketing and branding.” Traditionally, user-centered design has been taught mostly in graduate programs focused on human-computer interaction (HCI). A graduate program complements undergraduate education in ways that enable students to gain the variety of interdisciplinary skills required in UX. At the undergraduate level, HCI is most commonly offered as a minor, following the recommendations of a 1992 ACM report on HCI curricula, which suggested that it would be premature to focus entirely on HCI at the undergraduate level. However, graduate education alone cannot keep up with the demand of the UX profession. As the profession grows, and the market opens more and more opportunities for employment, the need emerges for undergraduate programs that prepare students for UX professions. Because of its fundamental interdisciplinarity, undergraduate UX education poses a number of unique challenges for traditional undergraduate programs that are often positioned to develop little more than interdisciplinary awareness, in addition to some depth in a chosen area of study. In this paper, we describe how one program tackled the challenge of creating a UX undergraduate major and present the resulting curriculum structure. Throughout the program’s development, we attempted to take a user-centered approach. We explain how P ge 26656.2 we used or adapted popular concepts and techniques from user-centered design, such as personas, to develop the program and curriculum. The Approach: User-centered design User-centered design is a design philosophy and practice that aims to create systems oriented to serve their users’ need. There are philosophical similarities between learner-centered curriculum design and user-centered design, in that they both focus on the individual and her cognitive processes. User-centered design is, however, more than a philosophy. When applied to human-computer interaction, user-centered design, and the associated new profession of user experience design, employ a process that ensures users’ needs, goals, and feedback are taken into account throughout the design process. One core characteristic of the user-centered design process is that it strives to achieve indepth understanding of users, stakeholders, and their goals. This understanding is often summarized in a user profile or persona and leads to deriving specific design requirements for the new product. Another core characteristic is the iterative integration of user feedback throughout various stages of development, beginning with the early conceptual stages. In this paper, we explain how we adapted techniques from usercentered design to create a learner-centered curriculum. Step 1: Understanding Clients, Stakeholders, and the Problem The first step in the user-centered design process requires that we understand the problem, the client, the stakeholders, and the users. In this particular situation, we can think of the higher administrative bodies that approve undergraduate curricula as the clients, since a defining characteristic of clients is that they can grant or withdraw approval for a project and the details of its development. At a major state university, changes in the undergraduate curriculum undergo review and approval from committees at the department, college and university level. Stakeholders are parties that “have something at stake.” They can either influence or can be influenced by the solution being developed, but they are not direct users of the product/service, nor do they have the decision making prerogatives that clients do. In this case, we identified two major groups of stakeholders: the first is external to the university and comprises of potential employers who look for college graduates with specific skill sets. This stakeholder group was represented by an advisory board comprised of industry partners and department alumni. The second stakeholder group is internal to the organization, and is comprised of the faculty and staff members whose work would be in any way influenced by the development of a new major. The types of influences can range from new courses that need to be taught, space and resource allocation, dealing with student enrollment, and so on. For an undergraduate program, the users are the students who would enroll in the major. We conceptualized our users as current high school students who would be eligible to apply for admission to the new major, and current undergraduates of our program, especially freshmen, who might be interested in transferring to the new major once it is established. P ge 26656.3 We formulated the problem we were trying to address with this project as follows: There is an increased market need for graduates with UX skills. Currently, our department graduates a few students every semester who assemble a version of the required skillset due to the choices of elective courses they make. There is an increasing demand among our current students who take the one available undergraduate course on user-centered design for more courses on the topic. The department is faced with slowing application and enrollment rates and needs to create programs and majors to attract more applicants. As a whole, the university is driving towards innovation in undergraduate education, with special emphasis on interdisciplinary and competency-based education. Taken together, these factors create a fertile environment that presents the opportunity to innovate. Our understanding of the problem emerged from iterative rounds of conversations with our clients, stakeholders, and users. Some conversations were informal, others were department or college-wide meetings, and some involved archiving and analyzing formal and informal student feedback about the one undergraduate-level user-centered design course the department offered in order to understand student needs. As several members of the client and stakeholder groups became convinced that this problem/opportunity needed to be addressed, we proceeded to the initial planning stages. Step 2: Vision A persona is a popular concept and technique in user-centered design. A persona is defined as a composite archetype of the user group. It is generated after in-depth research and understanding of the user group and as such, it is a technique for presenting research data in a way that is easy to understand and creates empathy with users. A name and photograph, as well as details about the persona’s daily life, are used in a persona description to provide vivid detail and facilitate empathy. The literature emphasizes how important it is for the persona to be based on actual research data rather than stereotypes or opinions. When not enough data is available, a hypothetical or ad-hoc persona is used. In developing the vision and goals for our project, we did not use a persona in the traditional sense. We grounded our decisions in the understanding of the problem, clients, stakeholders and users that emerged from the first step, and adapted the persona concept to create what we introduce as a vision persona. With a vision persona, we crafted a description of the ideal graduate of our yet-to-be-envisioned program. We began with the question, where is this graduate one year after graduation? Where does the graduate work? What is the graduate able to do? Because recruitment of women and underrepresented minorities in our program is always a priority, just like in many STEM programs in the US, we created a female persona and named her Sarah. The persona description we used is presented in Figure 1.