Teaching
As a UX practitioner with experience at start-up and Fortune 500 companies, my objective is to connect students with theory and practice that are key to thriving in an industry setting. My teaching philosophy balances learning actionable, practical skills through active learning, and understanding theoretical tenets behind those skills within their relevant context.
This approach of balancing practice and theory has distinguished my teaching career, training designers, engineers, and product managers at Daqri, Adobe, and Meta. You will receive hands-on practice grounded in a theoretical foundation, while developing the mindset of staying up-to-date and applying new methods as appropriate.
Highlights
Adjunct Professor, UC Berkeley's School of Information, Intro to UX Design (Info 213), Fall 2022, Fall 2023.
Lead, UX Research Curriculum Development and Teaching, Adobe Research Enablement Toolkit, 2017-2021
Intro to UX Design Course
Highlights from the Info 213 UC Berkeley Syllabus, Fall 2023
Course OVerview
In this course, you will learn how to design technologies that work well and meet the needs of their users; how to communicate and justify your design decisions; and how human-centered design fits into the broader context of product development.
You will receive an introduction to the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and learn to apply human-centered design to User Experience (UX) design and evaluation. We will also cover a few special topic areas within HCI, such as HCI x AI.
Skills taught
Observation: Practice needfinding using design research methods (e.g., interviews, diary studies) to define a problem space.
Prototyping: After learning to ideate and prioritize potential solutions, prototype solutions using low-fi and high-fi prototyping techniques.
Evaluation: Test your prototypes using methods such as heuristic evaluation and usability testing.
Communication: Present your designs and justify your decisions in ways that are grounded in research-backed methods.
Class lectures are based on the following resources:
Observing the User Experience, Second Edition: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research
Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces
Topics and activities
Every week, class consists of a lecture and a related activity which you will work on in class. Activities will give you the opportunity to practice the topics of that week. Students will also complete a semester-long final project on a problem of their choice.
Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: Iterative design, product development lifecycle
Critique: Come up with ideas for your final projects. Participate in design critique and learn to effectively ask for/receive feedback on ideas from other students.
Week 3: Observation - Interviews and other forms of data gathering
Practice an interview: Form groups of three, practice interviewing each other on a set topic and iterating on your discussion guide.
Week 4: Observation - Analyze, insights, reflection, personas
Personas: Analyze the data gathered from your previous activity. Create personas based on your data. Consider benefits and potential pitfalls of presenting needfinding data as personas.
Week 5: Prototyping - Scenarios and storyboards
Storyboard: Brainstorm in a group and create storyboards representing different ideas related to a set topic.
Week 6: Prototyping - Prototypes (low-fi)
Paper prototypes: Make prototypes for your final projects.
Week 7: Prototyping - Prototypes (high-fi)
Figma prototypes: Iterate on your paper prototypes and create high-fi prototypes using Figma.
Week 8: Prototyping - Human factors, laws of UX, visual design
Critique: Analyze and present critiques of two website for the presence/absence of the laws of UX and visual design.
Week 9: Evaluation - Usability testing
Usability test: Work in groups of three and conduct two usability tests on two given websites.
Week 10: Evaluation - Other usability inspection methods, heuristic evaluation
Heuristic evaluation: Conduct a heuristic evaluation on a given website.
Week 11: Communicate - How to communicate design, design doc, portfolio
Design doc: Create a design doc for your final project
Week 12: Ethics and politics of HCI
Values assessment: Use the Tarot Cards of Tech to assess the ethics and potential impacts and harms of your final project.
Week 13: Guest speakers (special topics in UX and HCI)
Week 14: Final presentations
Acknowledgements
Special thank you to Niloufar Salehi (Fall 2022 co-instructor), Evan Peck, James Landay, Michael Bernstein.