Navigating Ambiguous Problems in User Experience Mastery Course at the School of Information

Aalap Doshi
2 min readJan 11, 2025

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I teach a semester-long course to Masters students at UMSI around navigating ambiguous problems in user research. Below is a brief description of the course.

Course Overview

User Experience Design emerged as an interdisciplinary research and design program in the 2000s, expanding from earlier approaches such as Participatory Design, Human-Computer Interaction and User Interface Design. Today, one of the most common job titles of graduates of our UMSI Master’s program is some variation of “User experience designer.” The title is broad enough to mean a range of activities involving social, scientific, technical, creative, and critical thinking skills. Often what is meant is highly dependent on the institutional culture of the employer. Some institutions have evolved practices for user experience, while others have a very nascent understanding and expectation of the field. What is common across institutions however is that most user experience designers are tasked with tackling ambiguous, scarcely defined problems. This involves problem-framing (getting the right idea) as much as problem-solving (getting the idea right). My experience is that most early-career designers are more comfortable with getting the idea right but tend to find it difficult to navigate situations where institutions/teams/clients don’t know what they want to do. In this course, I argue that navigating ambiguous situations is an important and inseparable part of a user experience designer’s capability. Furthermore, I propose that problem framing or getting the right idea is an outcome of a carefully orchestrated series of activities (design process), and not the beginning of one. Finally, I hope to inspire students to create UX processes that constantly strive to seek the balance between problem-framing and problem-solving.

If you want a snapshot of the course, you are welcome to try my 5-day email course on Navigating Ambiguous Problems.

Course Objectives

Course readings, activities, and assignments were designed to provide students with opportunities to achieve the following goals by the end of the semester:

  1. Understand the anatomy of a problem with fuzzy goals and build the vocabulary to engage with it.
  2. Design a sustainable & adaptable design process (for fuzzy goals) that has buy-in from other disciplinary representatives.
  3. Effectively communicate the design process through visual, written, and verbal mediums, with people from diverse backgrounds.
  4. Use the process to solve a design problem.

The objectives help students create a portfolio piece that clearly articulates their ability to string conceptual theories and practical methods together to solve ambiguous problems in user experience.

Course Structure

The course is divided into five ‘blocks’:

  1. Overview & Planning
  2. Discovery
  3. Strategy
  4. UI/Interaction Design
  5. Communication & Influence

The first few weeks of the course are spent establishing the properties and characteristics of a problem with fuzzy goals. The second block is where students explore various design processes and arrangements that enable a team to solve fuzzy problems. Finally, students spend a few weeks towards the end unpacking frameworks to communicate their design process and influence others to engage with it.

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Aalap Doshi
Aalap Doshi

Written by Aalap Doshi

Director of Product & IT (Product, UX, and Engineering) @ ICPSR

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