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

Teaching about the link between human memory and the Laws of UX.

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:

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.