Modelling User Experience: Integrating User Experience Research Into Design Education

The last two decades have given a new lease of life to the interpretation of users’ interactions with products in human-computer interaction (HCI) and design domains. As a fast growing field, user experience (UX) brought along multifarious endeavors to frame this new field’s definition and components. In the midst of this burgeoning field, many design related domains started to embrace the terms experience, services, and systems rather than a mere product focus. Academia’s efforts to define what UX really is, influenced the practice by trying to investigate how UX can be put in action. Hence, growing demand from industry created a need for fully trained and specialized UX designers, turning the attention back again to academia. Although one of the most critical components of UX is research to understand users, their interactions, environments, and even the invisible factors; selecting and applying appropriate methods and tools are of high challenge due to concomitant dependence of experiences on subjective perceptions, contextual ties, and timewise conditions. In this light, we have devised a course to be integrated into design education at graduate level with the aim of teaching how to comprehend, interpret, and communicate UX to present input for the design process with a special approach. The particular approach is “modelling UX” because designing for experience and evaluating the success of design output, as well as bethinking scientific improvements and improving the practice, entail investigating experiences with opportune research methods. After delineating background for devising a UX course, this paper dwells on the objectives, content, structure, and outputs of our course; which would be a scaffolding resource for efforts to integrate UX research into design education.