Four Practices for Designing Student-Centered Courses — As a user-centered approach to design work, participatory design offers great entry points and practices for instructors interested in making their courses more student-centered. In this article, I explain and reframe participatory design principles for the classroom by providing four practices for student-centered, participatory course design. I’ve found these principles…

19 lessons over 19 years at an academic library — I worked at the University of Arizona Libraries for 19 years (half my life!), starting as a student shelver and then public services staff before landing my first librarian job in 2008. My interest was always around improving library websites, services, and spaces. My work in UX started in 2010…

Most of my work as a soccer coach did not fall on game day. My work happened behind the scenes, everyday at practice, and in the classroom where I would get to know and understand players’ personalities. Similar to how user experience design centralizes users, a coach’s priority is the…

In the fall of 2021, I was given an incredible opportunity to be a User Experience (UX) Research and Design Intern. As someone who had absolutely no experience in UX, to humbly be able to learn and work with the UX team at the University of Arizona Libraries for the…

3 Psychology Principles Critical for UXers — My name is Katrina and I study Psychology and Professional and Technical Writing at the University of Arizona. Having dreamed of a career in medicine, I came to the university hoping to learn about science and how to be an empathetic caregiver. So, majoring in psychology was an easy choice…

Making the most of a UX internship in a library — In 2021, I was lucky enough to be referred to Rebecca Blakiston, the user experience strategist at the University of Arizona Libraries. She graciously gave me a remote position as Community Engagement Intern that could not have been any more perfect! During my internship I focused on three main areas…

The story of Tiny Café — We know it’s important to test early and often, and that we should gather user data to inform our design decisions, but so many of us neglect to do it in any frequent, systematic way, often due to time and budget constraints. …

Lessons learned from the field — Leaving behind academic research Before my summer internship in 2021, to me research meant spending months reading and writing journal articles that require months of peer review. At times, academic research seemed intentionally slow. In my past career, I was postdoctoral scholar and lecturer in sociology, who focused on comparative historical analysis of 19th…

Working remotely during a pandemic — I’m Yashu, an international student from India at the University of Arizona, and this is a story of what happened after I got home, continuing the previous story. After landing in Mumbai, India on March 21, 2020, I had a massive challenge in front of me: How will I make…