An old dog teaching new designers
Several years ago, an IBM colleague who was an adjunct instructor at Austin Community College asked me to speak to his class about my background and experiences as a UX designer. I was happy to do it because I’m a big believer in community colleges. I attended one during a very formative period in my life and I remember it as a very positive experience.
As a result of that speaking engagement, I was introduced to one of the full-time professors, David Correa. David was in the process of developing a new UX Design program. He invited me to sit on the advisory board responsible for creating it. It was truly one of those, right place/right time kind of situations.
At the board meeting, I changed the trajectory of the program simply by asking if they’d heard of Design Thinking. They had not. At that time, IBM Design was still in its infancy, actively putting design thinking into practice at scale. I introduced Design Thinking and shared how we were rolling it out at IBM. After subsequent conversations about process and practice, I managed to get my toe in the door as an adjunct professor. I began teaching the program’s introductory course, Survey of UX Design.
By design, a survey course is intended to just skim the surface of a subject; to introduce the topic in general terms and pique interest. I regard the class as a critical gateway. If I do a good job with it, students will feel energized and want to engage further with the program. If I’m less than inspiring, they’ll abandon us for other venues. So, I take what I do quite seriously.
The way I teach the course is to lead the students, as a team, through the design of an application just like a professional design team would do it. The students choose the application they’re designing as a group so that the topic is compelling and personal enough to sustain their interest for the entire semester.
With the design goal chosen, we’re off to the races. We begin at the heart of the matter: user research. Developing empathy for our users is a central goal of a user-centered design process, so starting them off with the topic of research is critical. I’m very fortunate to have colleagues at IBM who volunteer to share their expertise with my class. Having a dedicated user researcher come in and give a guest lecture provides just that much more motivation and inspiration to the students. Once the students learn about user research they immediately prepare for conducting user interviews.
After they’ve conducted the interviews the design process continues with generating empathy maps, to-be scenarios, and user personas as we seek to clearly understand our users and their needs.
Then it’s on to designing, my sweet spot. I can sometimes feel a little out of my depth during the research phase, but I’ve done enough design to feel confident in my abilities to guide and inspire. We explore big ideas and prioritize them. We practice sketching techniques (sharpie and paper) and then move on to higher fidelity in the application Sketch. Finally, they’ll use an application such as InVision to create a clickable prototype in order to test their designs.
Once the application is designed and the prototype built, the students are tasked with user validation of their designs. This last bit almost always proves challenging because they’re usually scrambling to find users. But somehow, they pleasantly surprise me and manage to line up testing sessions to validate their designs. If there’s time in the semester, we’ll iterate on the designs based on user feedback gathered.
The course culminates with a group presentation of their journey through the Design Thinking process. It’s a great thing to see and share the student’s sense of pride and accomplishment. Being a part of their journey is a nice feedback loop for me as I both prepare to repeat the teaching process and strive to produce creative, engaging designs for my IBM project. And it feels good to be a part of a larger design community effort, training and inspiring new designers for an active role in the industry.
Like I said previously, I’m a big fan of the community college. They serve a vital role for a particular demographic group with which I once identified — adult learners who’re beginning or returning to school in their late 20’s to early 30’s. Folks who may already have a degree but don’t like their current profession, or those who just didn’t have the opportunity to attend college immediately after high school. These older students bring a particular curiosity and passion for learning that younger students sometimes lack. They’ve been out in the world and tried their hand at something only to find the experience lacking. I’m happy and honored to help them discover the field of UX Design.
Perhaps your local community college has a similar program. Perhaps they’re waiting for someone like you to propose the creation of such a program. If this old school enterprise designer can get engaged, so can you.
