Colin M. Gray

Evolution of design competence in UX practice

There has been increasing interest in the adoption of UX within corporate environments, and what competencies translate into effective UX design. This paper addresses the space between pedagogy and UX practice through the lens of competence, with the goal of understanding how students are initiated into the practice community, how their perception of competence shifts over time, and what factors influence this shift. A 12-week longitudinal data collection, including surveys and interviews, documents this shift, with participants beginning internships and full-time positions in UX. Students and early professionals were asked to assess their level of competence and factors that influenced competence. A co-construction of identity between the designer and their environment is proposed, with a variety of factors relating to tool and representational knowledge, complexity, and corporate culture influencing perceptions of competence in UX over time. Opportunities for future research, particularly in building an understanding of competency in UX based on this preliminary framing of early UX practice are addressed.

Flow of Competence in UX Design Practice

UX and design culture are beginning to dominate corporate priorities, but despite the current hype there is often a disconnect between the organizational efficiencies desired by executives and the knowledge of how UX can or should address these issues. This exploratory study addresses this space by reframing the concept of competence in UX to include the flow of competence between individual designers and the companies in which they work. Our reframing resulted in a preliminary schema based on interviews conducted with six design practitioners, which allows this flow to be traced in a performative way on the part of individuals and groups over time. We then trace this flow of individual and organizational competence through three case studies of UX adoption. Opportunities for use of this preliminary schema as a generative, rhetorical tool for HCI researchers to further interrogate UX adoption are considered, including accounting for factors that affect adoption.

Designerly Tools, Sketching, and Instructional Designers and the Guarantors of Design

Sketching can be a means to visualize learning objects and experiences differently than is possible in text-based representations. In particular, the experiential qualities of designed experiences can be explored using sketching as a tool and may not be accessible to designers via other means. If designers are to assume appropriate responsibility for our designs, to be the guarantors of design, our toolkit must expand. Examples are given of the ways in which sketching, as a flexible skill, may be used to represent designs for learning, together with discussion of how instructional designers would need to be able to think about these sketches in order to use them as tools.

Critiquing the Role of the Learner and Context in Aesthetic Learning Experiences

I critique the role of learners and context to more fully explore the latent conceptions and performance of aesthetic learning experiences in instructional design and technology. This critique is intended to allow for a fuller interrogation of how individual learners apprehend designed learning experiences, heightening the role of the instructional designer in envisioning such experiences. Using a 1-year ethnography of a graduate human–computer interaction program to document the felt student experience, I highlight the importance of understanding how learners construct their own experiences during the learning process through the roles they take on and the informal pedagogical experiences they create. I identify additional areas of research that are needed to expand our notions of designing for experience, informing both theory construction and practice.

Advancing UX Education: A Model for Integrated Studio Pedagogy

The rapid growth of the UX profession has led to an increased need for qualified practitioners and a proliferation of UX educational programs offered in both academia and industry. In this note, we present the design and initial evaluation of a new studio-based undergraduate program in UX--the first of its kind at a large, research-intensive US university. The program includes several curricular innovations, such as an integrated studio pedagogy in which six topical strands are interwoven across two types of studios. These studios are interconnected and span five semesters of the undergraduate experience. We present the curriculum model and the foundational principles that informed its design. We describe the two types of studios and their interconnection, and present early evaluation data showing that students are building valuable skills. The program described in this note provides a trailblazing model for UX pedagogy at the undergraduate level.

Supporting Distributed Critique through Interpretation and Sense-Making in an Online Creative Community

Critique is an important component of creative work in design education and practice, through which individuals can solicit advice and obtain feedback on their work. Face-to-face critique in offline settings such as design studios has been well-documented and theorized. However, little is known about unstructured distributed critique in online creative communities where people share and critique each others work, and how these practices might resemble or differ from studio critique. In this paper, we use mixed-methods to examine distributed critique practices in a UX-focused online creative community on Reddit. We found that distributed critique resembles studio critique categorically, but differs qualitatively. While studio critique often focuses on depth, distributed critique often revolved around collective sensemaking, through which creative workers engaged in iteratively interpreting, defining, and refining the artifact and their process. We discuss the relationship between distributed critique and socio-technical systems and identify implications for future research.

Learners Interpreting Instructional Images: Meaning-Making and Decision-Making Strategies

Abstract Instructional images are used widely in textbooks and other learning materials, but the role of learner interpretation has not been adequately explored. While previous research has demonstrated the diversity of interpretation derived from images by learners, this research has not consistently taken place in the context of authentic learning tasks. In this study, we examine the interpretations made by in a university environment in an authentic learning context—specifically foreign language learners. Participants included English speakers learning Arabic and Arabic speakers learning English, and their use of a set of designed illustrations. Meaning-making and decision-making strategies were identified, demonstrating the nondeterministic role of images in the learning activity.

Creativity 'misrules': First year engineering students' production and perception of creativity in design ideas

We report four cases from a larger study, focusing on participants’ self-identified “most creative” concept in relation to their other concepts. As part of an ideation session, first-year engineering students were asked to create concepts for one of two engineering design problems in an 85-minute period, and were exposed to one of two different forms of fixation. Participants worked as individuals, first using traditional brainstorming techniques and generating as many ideas as possible. Design Heuristics cards were then introduced, and students were asked to generate as many additional concepts as possible. After the activity, participants ranked all of the concepts they generated from most to least creative. Representative cases include a detailed analysis of the concept that each participant rated as “most creative,” idea generation method used, and relative location and relationship of the concept to other concepts generated by that participant. Across four cases, we identified a number of characteristic “misrules” or misconceptions, revealing that first-year students judge creativity in their concepts in ways that could inhibit their ability to produce truly novel concepts. We present Design Heuristics as a tool to encourage the exploration of creative concept pathways, empowering students to create more novel concepts by rejecting misrules about creativity.Copyright

Searching for Personal Territory in a Human-Computer Interaction Design Studio

Abstract The literature regarding studio-based education suggests that personal space is an integral component of a studio-based pedagogy (Brandt et al., 2010; Demirbaş and Demirkan, 2000). However, the extant studio designed for a Human-Computer Interaction design (HCI/d) programme at the Masters level examined in this study does not offer any apparent provision for such space. This study aimed to determine if and how students in a studio-based HCI/d programme create and maintain personal space in a publicly accessible studio that does not explicitly provide space dedicated to individuals. The results of this study indicated a tendency toward group territoriality, with individual territoriality as a non-normative behaviour. These groups were generally ad hoc in construction, which presents a number of possible curriculum features by which students loosely form groups. The student’s personal computer and other personal items often indicated individual boundaries as well. The faculty design focused on integration of faculty and student spaces, public display of student work and studio-based classes. At this early stage, there are gaps between implementation and design. Opportunities for further research are explored.

Appropriated or Inauthentic Care in Gig-Economy Platforms: A Psycho-linguistic Analysis of Uber and Lyft

In this late breaking work, we present preliminary results from a portion of an auto-ethnography in which an HCI scholar drove for both Uber and Lyft over the course of 4 months, recording his thoughts about the driving experience as well as his experiences with-and emails from-both platforms. The first phase of results we present here are based on several text analyses of the collected emails, as well as a preliminary examination of field notes in relation to these emails. We found that while Uber and Lyft participate in the gig economy in almost identical ways, the difference in tone apparent through each platforms messaging could lead to conflicting experiences for drivers. We identify implications for the potential future analyses of our autoethnographic data in relation to this psycholinguistic analysis.