Crafting a User Experience Curriculum

It isn’t often that one has the opportunity to create a course about user experience, let alone an entire sequence of user experience courses. Jason Withrow's opportunity forced him to examine his perceptions of the user experience industry.

Withrow, Jason. Boxes and Arrows (2005). Articles>Education>User Experience>User Centered Design

Self-Education in UX and Working with User Research Data

How you can educate yourself in user experience. The best ways to capture and present user research data.

Six, Janet M. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Education>User Experience>Research

Self-Education in UX and Working with User Research Data

What are some good ways to educate myself in User Experience?

Six, Janet M. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Education>User Experience>Audience Analysis

The Dynamic Discourse of Visual Literacy in Experience Design  

Educators should include new dimensions of visual literacy in academic curricula. Today’s students are actively involved in interactive experiences. They are contributing content to websites as well as designing websites and other types of online experiences for the public. Students need to understand the semiotics of interactive computing and how the integration of diverse sensory data with social interaction impacts the way we interpret online information.

Search, Patricia. TechTrends (2009). Articles>Education>Visual Rhetoric>User Experience

Designing the Total User Experience: Implications for Research and Program Development  

Information design has traditionally focused on usability as measured by functionality and efficiency in the execution of user tasks. Newer approaches to experience design and new communication technologies such as the so-called Web 2.0 platform and its Ajax engine emphasize total user engagement with the technology and richer collaborations among users. These developments complicate traditional notions of agency by highlighting the role of technology as mediator between and among users. A project in Tech-Mediated Communication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, funded by the Society for Technical Communication, illustrates how these developments impact the development of novel and creative information resources, with several experiments in cross-cultural, community-oriented, and educational systems design. This work also emphasizes the need to develop research agendas and programmatic initiatives that support interdisciplinary collaborative design activities and thus help technical communicators to meet their collective responsibility to influence and shape the mediating technologies of the future by creating more engaging and more collaborative total user experiences.

Zappen, James P. and Cheryl Geisler. Programmatic Perspectives (2009). Articles>Education>Information Design>User Experience