What I learned from teaching UX

Top 7 insights on how to teach UX

For a second year, I travel to Paris to teach UX for 2 days to 5th-year students in Marketing and Communication, some of whom have not heard of UX before.

When I first accepted the opportunity to teach UX, I was overly excited. My full-time job is a product designer and I can create user experiences in my sleep. I’ve attended countless UX meetups, workshops and 2-hour crash courses, I knew what I was getting into. I felt confident I can teach others because I knew everything about UX. I soon realised that teaching and working in UX are two completely separate things.

What I did NOT know before starting teaching the course:

1. The challenge to explain UX to people who have never heard of it before, work in tech or relevant industry; (Most students were interning in fashion companies)
2. Engaging your audience when the workshop is mandatory because they had to receive grades — It is always a challenge to keep your audience engaged;
3. The course was only 8 hours, and initially I didn’t realise how little that is;

So I approached teaching UX as any other project and started with the user needs or my students in this case. My first year, was the MVP of the course and I’ve learned a lot since then. For my second year, I pivoted and adapted the course from my learnings in year 1.

Here are the top 7 insights I’ve learned about creating an engaging UX course:

1. Know your audience — Personas

Regardless of whether the UX workshop was mandatory or not, it is important to make the content relevant. I started the course with casual “Getting to know each other” session. All of them were interning in different companies and we spent some time sharing what their position is. It was extremely useful for me to know their real-life experiences so I can relate and give them UX context in the environment they are exposed to. The industries they were in was diverse, as well as their roles. However, one thing remained constant that they all worked in digital.

I find this section useful for the following reasons:

• Getting to know each other shows that you care about what they do
• They feel more confident communicating with you as you reduce the barrier teacher/student
• You also get valuable information about your audience to adapt your talk better

3. Types of learners

According to Literacy Learners there are 7 types of learners. To ensure that my students will go out of the classroom with some knowledge on UX I had to find a way to connect with all of them. So I dived deep into researching the types of learners and finding a solution that fits them all.

• Auditory learners like to hear solutions and examples explained to them
• Kinesthetics prefer to physically engage with the materials of the subject matter
• Social learners show preference towards groups and collaboration
• Solitary learners prefer to work independently
• Logical students, always look to incorporate a system into their learning

“A solution that fits them all” is a dream, that if one tries to achieve, may fail. However, I found a compromise to equally cover the needs of the above mentioned learners. For example, the first 2 hours of the course were telling stories about the “Silicon Valley” method of approaching UX. Stories poured from books like “The Lean Startup” “Google Design Sprint” “Hooked” “Zero to one” “Elon Musk biography” “Steve Jobs biography” basically any relevant story that I could find linking to a good UX in a product.

In my first course, I talked quite a bit about the Gestalt principles, however I quickly felt how my students lost interest in going in too much detail around design. (Remember, that design was never their first career choice)

Next, I moved onto explaining them what is the course structure. What are the deliverables, how do you get your mark and so on — eg. setting up the KPIs of success.

I divided my students into groups. However, I was careful as I was aware that solitary learners might feel uncomfortable working in a group. I wanted to give autonomy to each individual in a team to contribute towards the project. Hence, why I chose Figma, where my students could collaborate on their projects individually.

3. “Every company is in the software industry”

I leaned strongly on the fact that they all work in digital, which helped me structure the course. I tried to find content that is relevant. For example, in my first year, I used examples of bad UX in the real world. The left example below is user experiences in the real world and its a common picture you can find if you google “bad UX”. I thought everyone gets into an elevator so everyone knows the pain if the layout is confusing. However that example didn’t resonate with them. So the second year, I tried to create a story about good UX around the latest tech news. The example I provided was Tesla, and recently the company name has become a buzzword for younger people, I immediately got their interest.

1st-year vs 2nd-year examples

The example is the new Tesla feature “Service request” — Tesla cars can now order parts for itself when in need of service repair. It is a brand new feature (was announced 1 month before I taught the course) and that kept them interested. I also tried to create an engaging story around it:

“Imagine you or your relatives have a car and something breaks: 1.You need to look for a mechanic; 2. Maybe read a bit yourself see if you can fix it by your own; 4. Know the technical terminology to discuss properly with the mechanic what the issue is 5. Find a trusted mechanic; 6.Find quote pricing and go for the cheapest —A lot of steps to fix a problem. Imagine you have a Tesla and you just get a pop up message that something is about to break and orders it for you — even before it does. If you had the budget, would you spent a little bit more for the convenience — The answer is probably “Yes” and that is because of the good user experience.”

4. Empower them to make their own decisions by creating autonomy

As we set up the expectations and the KPIs, we moved onto hands-on workshop. Imagine all the design sprint artillery you can get in a room — that meant — post-its, voting notes, markers, A3, A4 sheets, timers. I asked my students to leave their laptops behind and focus on the briefs.

They got two briefs to chose from (the choice gives them autonomy) and every group made their choice. My reasoning behind working in a group was to create a real-life experience. Big part of the job of the UX designer is effective communication — between users, stakeholders and the team.

After we were done with the personas, user flows and all the discovery deliverables, we started looking into Figma. At first, some of the students were quite conservative towards the tool. They have experienced the learning curve of Photoshop before and were biased towards design tools.

Why Figma?

• It is free for 1 collaborative project
• Every team member gets to edit the space
• Very small learning curve
• I could easily assist and help students in the virtual space
• They could easily present and prototype their projects
• I could easily assess their collaboration and overall effort in the final result
• Figma had wireframe templates which helped reduce the workload on my students (https://www.figma.com/templates/)

This is how my workspace looked like. I had access and visibility to all project progress and didn’t need to stand over the shoulder of my students and interrupt their creative process.

5. Teach them empathy, everything else follows

During the course, one thing remained constant. Me trying to remind my students, that whatever they design, they need to ask one question: “Would I use this website, if I didn’t design it?”. One of the crucial skills that a UX designer needs to have is empathy towards their users, to be able to put themselves in their shoes and know their behaviours.

6. Teaching is learning

Learning by teaching others is extremely effective. Teaching helped me master my UX skills and develop a deeper understanding of it. Through organizing the material and seeking out key pieces of information, I learned to develop a methodology and approach to communicate complex information.

Try teaching yourself, it can start from explaining a complex topic to your friend or colleagues, or giving a small talk at work around the discipline your are working in, or if you have the opportunity to teach in a classroom you should always give it a try!

Hope this article was useful, if you need any advice or want to chat more about teaching UX, feel free to contact me.