What If We Designed College Around Students?

By Richard Culatta and Sandy Speicher

While there might not be obvious similarities between a Silicon Valley start-up and a public college in Rhode Island, taking a page from the tech- industry playbook may be the key to the future of higher education.

It doesn’t take long during a conversation among app developers before someone mentions the term UX — user experience. The term refers to the interaction between a person and a tool or system. Understanding the user experience guides the decisions that developers make as they design apps: Do users intuitively know how to use a particular app, or does it leave them confused and disoriented? If they have a bad experience, people simply won’t use it, regardless of its capabilities. Successful companies make user experience a top priority.

It’s not just the tech sector that realizes the importance of designing a good user experience. Businesses and organizations across many sectors, whether Facebook or Target or Kaiser Permanente, have user-experience teams that constantly seek to understand their customers’ needs and to redesign their services when necessary. Lately there have been serious discussions about the need for more innovation in higher education. The traditional higher-education model has remained, in many ways, static for more than a century. Yet our institutions often remain “provider focused” rather than “user focused,” even as they struggle to evolve.

What would happen if every college in the country created a user-experience team?

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Originally published as “Shadow Those Students, for Their Own Good” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 10/25/2016