Mapping UX Design to Education

Creating your curricula style guide: Let’s make curriculum creative by drawing from practices used in web design!

A common practice when designing for the web is to use or develop your own style guide. A style guide is a set of standards which aim to align standards with an organization’s mission or goals and build consistency across digital products resulting in a more efficient and pleasant user experience. A style guide includes design principles which are a set of guidelines that influence how we approach and solve problems. If the design world is using them, we can too!

creative white boarding for our collaboration session resulting in our style guide

We used post-its and a value sorting activity with a cohort of colleagues to establish our list. Here is what we came up with:

Values [for project]

• Supports Student Agency
• Practices Human Centered Design
• Is Accessible
• Is Motivating
• Is integrated and supportive of class materials/content/assessments

Design Principles

1. Our students are diverse and have diverse needs
2. In different times and on different devices I (student) need different things
3. Inspire agency
4. Make sure materials are accessible and usable
5. Capture an efficient (on-boarding) process for students
6. Materials and information are relevant for a diverse set of user needs
7. The design of on-boarding materials is a collaborative process with faculty & student partners & feedback
8. Minimize my cognitive efforts looking for the information I need: I (student) may have dexterity, fatigue, cognitive, or memory challenges
9. Provide information that is meaningful and to me (student) and my progress in this course
10. Encourage questions (from students)