Designing a course for UX Designers

3,5 month. 36 classes. 1680 slides. 8 tests. 2 projects. 1 hackaton. Boom…

When I was just getting started with preparing a syllabus for the course, I didn’t find any resources that could help me. Hence now, as I’ve walked through this journey, I’d like to share my own story and difficulties I’ve faced along the way. You’ll find here description of the strategy, tools, tips and advice's for future trainers. Hopefully my example will be helpful for those, who’s facing the same problem.

Some mid-study shots and copies from course student’s.

Prehistory

In the beginning of 2016 I moved to Tbilisi (Georgia) to be a UX design trainer. During my study period in Estonia, I frequently struggled to learn because of the 2 simple reasons:

1. Lack of feedback from Tutors (usually only during the presentations, but not the process)

2. Cold relation toward students.

Besides I’ve been realizing that for most of us learning online is a winning option thanks to the flexibility it provides. What it lacks — is an indispensable real communication that I have to provide. The mission was clear:

Share what I've learned and be as friendly and responsive as possible.

1. Input: students

First working day. 25.01.2016

We started in 18 people. Graduated — 11. Mainly student’s backgrounds were: trainers, managers, graphic designers, IT developers and engineers.
Here is a challenge: when we jumped into this, decent amount of students were not quite aware what User Experience design even is. When some of them realized that the term “UX Design” doesn’t literally means:

“Making money drawing squares and circles” — they simply wiped away. At first that made me sad, but on the practice work started to flow smoothly. Irrelevant questions were over, lack of English understanding dissapeared and we started to focus on what matters. Quantity turned into quality.

Takeaway. Here I realized how important is the student’s motivation and prior preparation. It’s really a trainer’s responsibility to interview and select future students before start. Just to make sure that people you’re taking on board will not let your efforts down. In my case students were selected without my participation.

2. Strategy

Albert Einstein was once asked: “If you have one hour to save the world, how would you spend that hour?” He replied, “I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and then 5 minutes solving it.”

85% of our time we were focusing on the research, user testing, prototyping. And only 15% on User Interface (UI) design. Yes, we‘ve learnt the Adobe PhSh & AI basics and the most convenient shortcuts to create a stuff, but further development and experiments I left totally up to the motivation of students.

My target was to teach them how to think critically, read and analyze and present.

Challenge: To design a comprehensive course. Instead of 3 years study — compress it all into 3 months. From Zero to Hero. Eventually, I even started to called my students:

“UX design superheroes”.

Talking about syllabus.

3 main cores to train:
(1) Logic to ensure that what we’re developing makes sense. (2) Creativity connecting with logic to arrive to innovative solutions. And eventually, (3)Presenting skills, as if you cannot perform and persuade with your presentation, you’ll never be able to sell a bunch of your work. And who wants to break against the rocks?

3. Program

I divided applications into 3 main blocks:

(1) Theory, (2)Practice,(3) Projects.

1.Theory: We’ve been talking about what, why and how. Discussing examples, talking about real world applications and finally learning most common patterns, guides and styles.

Student Alexander Janiashvili exploring vectors capabilities.

2. Practice: applying and practicing Adobe graphic skills. Starting from drawing Hearts, ending up by drawing the GUI elements for websites.

First month practice. Students: Sopo Sharabidze, Tamazi Jobava, Temo Baratashvili, Guram Sanikidze, Alexander Janiashvili

Second month practice. Students: Temo Baratashvili and Malkhaz Pertaia

3. Projects: And finally no-brainer that we needed to nail what we’ve learned. Not only by showing how can we find issues, but also whether we’re able to work in teams, manage the process and defend the best ideas.

So main deliverable was broken down equally into 2 projects:

Personal and Group work

Offered work-frames for each project

Besides amount of people per project, those projects also had their own specifics:

1. For personal project we followed almost classic process model, offered by British Design council in 2014 : Double diamond. But to make it even more clear, I also broke it down into the milestones according to the J.J.Garret “5 planes of UX design”. In the Personal project we worked on the existing service redevelopment. Each student picked the topic of his personal interest. In terms of work, it was feedback and consultations based.

Brainstorming on the group project topics

1. Group projects instead generally were following same process model, but more flexible and up to the students. I only offered them to follow 13 steps, but each team would work on their own pace. When we started to work on the Group projects, we had a huge theme: Global problems. By issue mapping , we were able to break it down into the 3 sub-topics and consequently 3 teams. Group project meant that team have to create a new service from scratch. And here, unlike the personal project I have not been involved in the process. Only team members could help each other to solve UX riddles.

Keep working. Second month.

4. Trainer’s presentations

First i struggled

During the casual student’s presentation

Separately I would like to cover theory block or my personal Presentations. I had quite limited time to provide strategically aligned content for 3h every second day. Define it, research, read, choose what’s relevant, create presentations with 50 slides average and learn what I’m going to say.

Here are 3 core elements: Content, Slides and Speech.

My problem : I had enough time only for 2/3. Something had to suffer: either I prepare weak content, either no slides or I simply i read from the slides, as I physically couldn’t learn by heart each slide.
Logically enough the speech accepted the blow.
So during the course I tried 3 presenting models shortcuts.

1. Comments below the slides. Literally I used 2 computers screens: one that projects an actual slide, second in front of me with the description of the current slide. It worked for 2 weeks, after I started to notice that students are getting less involved and interested. The thing is that I did not supply an eye contact and live interaction with them, that made the situation down. I should have change a strategy.
2. Papers with comments. Secondly I started to use a papers. So I took two a4 sheets, stood up and started moving around with a story, taking a glance into the papers time to time. Again, after 3 weeks I started heavily rely on the papers. Didn’t work.
3. Storytelling. And finally, after a while of training my memory and figuring out that personal presenting formula, I stopped using anything. More pictures in the slides, less text and more real examples. I guess it’s a natural progression that needs to be evolved with an experience. On my practice it took 2 months to come there.

What I’ve learned:

The best way to perform is to prepare a presentation as a storyboard and here is why:

1. Stories are interesting, so students don’t feel bored.
2. Slides with pictures helps me to continue the story naturally.
3. All that I needed to prepare are just relevant images (text is boring to read and long to write).

Finally, comments under the presentation works great. Especially for those students who’ve missed a class. But you’ll need to prepare a second (tech) presentation on the demand.

5. Content

36 classes = 1680slides

Materials with presentations, tools, freebie’s.

Slides

All presentations were done in Illustrator. I usually covered 2–3 subtopics per class. The slides done on the orange background — are the topics, blue — sub-topics, important takeaways and conclusions.

Images

Associative pictures and metamorphoses. I tried to search for expressive shots and have been adding a little color overlay.

Typography and details

I think that consistency is very important in the learning process. Visual language helps to digest materials smoothly and student understands easily what’s going on. Rules I’ve been following:

Dark grey Futura basic font with important outlines in orange. Blue bullet points for lists. Buttons shape when terms or comparisons are relevant. Orange stroke with rounded corners for illustrative pictures.

6. Testing

I have some scars regarding the Tests. It’s notoriously known that testing is stressful: worries, lose of a focus and motivation, mistakes. That was my primary image. Organizers of the course, though asked me to conduct a student’s testing once in a week. I gave my students a chance to use any materials during the test and once first test happened, I got a feedback:

- What a great test it was, it helped to sort out the materials and put the content on its own shelf’s.

And that actually blew my mind away. Indeed, I realized — passing a test it’s not a learning report. First of all it helps students to prioritize materials and analyze whether they’re correct in what they understood or not. We had 8 tests during the whole course and I declared at the beginning that course tests do no affect the final grade, but supports them in the learning process.

What final Grade consists of really is : a final Theory test and Project presentations. Here are themes that were examined on the final test.

Final test topics

And here are the criteria’s according to which Projects were evaluated. By the way, personal projects were evaluated collectively. Students evaluated every single project (which, i believe, helps to develop critical thinking). The good news: it worked. Only 7% were not very objective on their evaluation grades.

And finally, here are some of the final projects:

Redesign by Guram Sanikidze. Testing in Invision available here: https://invis.io/5Q75B2R3K#/154985136_Index

Content organization redesign by Sopo Sharabidze

“Product Check out” process made easier in app by Temo Baratashvili

7. Advice's or F.A.Q.

1. Good trainers copy, great teachers steal (almost Picasso)

Right after the final presentation. Remember? We’re in Georgia!

Basically — you don’t have to invent anything. You’re working out the strategy, taking materials from the reliable web sources and diluting it with your examples and experiences.
Your trainer’s value is in pivoting the strategy around the level of the group and your presence — you’re always there for them and unlike the computers willing to answer/coach them instantly.

2. Strategy is a King!

If you know what and why you’re doing, you don’t need to spend hours for preparation in advance. Focus on the strategy, plan few steps in advance and you’ll feel less stressful, better prepared and more confident.

3. What if I forgot what I’ve been talking about during the presentation?

It happens pretty often that by preparing your material, you feel that you follow the logic line and it all make sense. But the secret is that once you went out there, in front of the class — there are so many distractions (eyes, noise, self-confidence bugs). What happens pretty often — you lose a story line once you’ve started talking about the details. Like all that you’re saying doesn’t make any more sense. My secret sauce sounds like:

Always keep in mind the main topic (that one which is written on the first slide)!

Just asks yourself: Why you’re telling this? What was the main topic? This will help you to get back and see smiley faces on their casual places again.

3. Explanation requires metaphors.

Design is a tricky field, we’re always talking about something very abstract, that is hard to grasp. Once a student got distracted for a moment, he immediately jumped out of the track. I figured that comparisons must be as down on earth as possible. Talking about the font? Compare serif with a lazy hand from the bad in the Sunday morning. This gives a visual reference, it’s fun and then difficult becomes clear.

4. Emotions are useful!

Late night brainstormings

Emotions, oh my God. You’ll notice so much of them. 20 pairs of eyes are following you during couple of hours and you as a human being will receive every single of them, it’s impossible to ignore. It’s so important to not get sensitive taking them personally, but to use them as a feedback and help yourself to get better.

5. When you think it goes down and you loose a control .

It’s a natural feeling to over-dramatize the actual situation when you’ve got some control. The main rule — Don’t worry. Getting a bit of a rest and in the next morning start preparing a new piece of a material usually helped me. It’ll only get better and better (you’re getting better and better). My tip is: listen to what your students are saying and observe their feelings. Don’t close your eyes if you see them confused or irritated. Address it. Make surveys, pivot the course and voila!

6. Stay your own self.

Choose your natural behavior style. I know, it sounds pretty obvious, but when you get some power, you feel like you want to play around it, be better or smarter than you actually are. I beg you, do not. Besides the part that one day you’ll feel ashamed by being not able to answer someone’s question, you’ll also loose a trust and consequently hope for a deliverable. I mean don’t try to show how almighty you are, we’re all just a human-beings and we all learn with a time. If you’re easy-going and friendly person, but don’t have 10 years of experience — stay natural and helpful to your students.
It is quite a balancing act, you have your pros and cons, but be the best of yourself and they’ll love you, forgetting some drawbacks.

7. Source your lectures.

Yes, most of the students will read your presentations outside the class and they could simply not get what those beautiful pictures means. There is this thin edge : your slides has to be expressing and contain little text as possible. But when it comes to the learning from home and there is no speaker for each slide, they totally got lost. Hence, I’ve been asked to reference the materials when it’s possible.

Conclusion

Being a Design trainer means being a focused, confident, emphatic and creative person. It takes 2 crucial things: Focus on your content, and self-confidence to not get distracted by excessive emotional level in the group. Only you know the crux of the matter and they are here to unlock that truth with your help. Your methods will always have to get better and more interactive. If things are getting too predictive — then students know what to expect, figure out the shortcuts and skip what they can.

Good luck, trainers.

Happy End

During the hackaton presentations.

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