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Wednesday, 2-4:30 p.m. CDT: Prior registration required. Registrants have been sent Zoom link separately.
Teaching UX is challenging due to its breadth of content areas (information architecture, user research, content strategy, visual design, interaction design), methodologies (human centered design, agile, participatory design), methods (heuristic evaluations, comparative assessments, a/b tests, usability testing), and information products (wireframes, personas, content patterns).
UX is interdisciplinary and claimed by a variety of fields, including Technical and Professional Communication (TPC), which shares an intertwined history (Redish 2010, Barnum & Redish 2011). While UX and TPC overlap, there is a growth in UX positions that include responsibilities traditionally found in job postings for technical communicators (Lauer & Brumberger, 2013). TPC programs have been slow to transition to preparing students for UX roles. While some technical communication programs include a usability course (Meloncon & Henschel 2013), courses focused explicitly on UX design are less common (Getto, et al. 2013). Presenting a sole usability course is a disservice to students because it puts usability at the end of the process and does not allow for iteration (Zhou 2014). Many instructors have little experience or training in teaching usability or UX (Chong 2015) which are highly situated and rhetorically complex (Chong 2012, Scott 2008, Rose and Tenenberg 2016, Rose and Tenenberg 2017). We offer this workshop among the other voices calling for technical communication to more explicitly focus on the UX within its programs (Getto, et al. 2013; LaRoche & Traynor 2013; Getto & Beecher, 2016).
Given this complexity and breadth, designing a successful curriculum for UX requires deep collaboration and shared expertise. This workshop will gather and share insights from academic and practitioner communities and is especially timely due to the co-location of SIGDOC and CPTSC and the overlap of audiences interested in design, pedagogy, and program design.
Workshop Goals and Outcomes
- Bring together academics and practitioners who are actively engaged in UX pedagogy and practice to share their experience and expertise.
- Explore, discuss, and capture existing practices of UX teaching and mentoring.
- Establish a community of practice to build relationships to generate scholarship and resources related to UX pedagogy.
Structure and Format
We envision this three-hour workshop to be a collaborative and participatory learning experience. We plan to use the workshop to collect data on existing teaching practices and are currently pursuing IRB approval. Participants will be informed in advance that this is a research activity and will be asked for their consent. Participants can opt out of data collection and still participate in the workshop.
Part 1: Introduction to goals and workshop participants (:15)
Introduce participants to the goals of the workshop and each other. Form interdisciplinary teams.
Part 2: Exploring existing UX pedagogies and practices (:60)
Identify pedagogical practices and underlying theories, create journey maps of the student experience.
Part 3: Identifying competencies, skills, and dispositions (:60)
Brainstorm and affinity diagram areas of expertise for future UX practitioners.
Part 4: Future opportunities and supporting each other moving forward (:45)
Identify opportunity for ongoing collaboration, resource sharing, and communication.
References
Breuch, L. A. M. K., Zachry, M., & Spinuzzi, C. (2001). Usability Instruction in Technical Communication Programs: New Directions in Curriculum Development. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 15(2), 223–240. http://doi.org/10.1177/105065190101500204
Chong, F. (2012). Teaching usability in a technical communication classroom: Developing competencies to user-test and communicate with an international audience. In Proceedings of IEEE International Professional Communication Conference. http://doi.org/10.1109/ipcc.2012.6408613
Chong, F. (2015). The Pedagogy of Usability: An Analysis of Technical Communication Textbooks, Anthologies, and Course Syllabi and Descriptions. Technical Communication Quarterly, 25(1), 12–28. http://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2016.1113073
Getto, G., & Beecher, F. (2016). Toward a Model of UX Education: Training UX Designers Within the Academy. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 59(2),153–164. http://doi.org/10.1109/tpc.2016.2561139
Getto, G., Potts, L., Salvo, M. J., & Gossett, K. (2013). Teaching UX: Designing programs to train the next generation of UX experts. In Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Design of communication, pp. 65-70. SIGDOC, 2013. http://doi.org/10.1145/2507065.2507082
LaRoche, C., & Traynor, B. (2013, July). Technical communication on life support: Content strategy and UX are the reclamation. In IEEE International Professional Communication 2013 Conference (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
Lauer, C., & Brumberger, E. (2016). Technical Communication as User Experience in a Broadening Industry Landscape. Technical Communication, 63(3), 248-264.
Meloncon, L., & Henschel, S. (2013). Current state of US undergraduate degree programs in technical and professional communication. Technical Communication, 60(1), 45–64
Redish, J. (2010). Technical Communication and Usability:Intertwined Strands and Mutual Influences. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 53(3), 191–201. http://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2010.2052861
Scott, J. B. (2008). The Practice of Usability: Teaching User Engagement Through Service-Learning. Technical Communication Quarterly, 17(4), 381–412. http://doi.org/10.1080/10572250802324929
Zhou, Q. (2014). That usability course: what technical communication programs get wrong about usability and how to fix it. Communication Design Quarterly Review, 2(3),25–27. http://doi.org/10.1145/2644448.2644454
Rose, E.J. and Tenenberg, J. 2016. Arguing about design: A taxonomy of rhetorical strategies deployed by user experience practitioners. SIGDOC (Jul. 2016).
Rose, E.J and Tenenberg, J. 2017. Making Practice-Level Struggles Visible : Researching UX Practice to Inform Pedagogy. Communication Design Quarterly. 5, 1 (2017), 89–97.
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