Quantifying Design for User Experience Assignments Using Rubrics as Assessment Tools

There is an increasing interest in teaching user experience design in many of the industrial design bachelor’s programs. The subjectivity of the topic requires new approaches as well as reliable and valid assessment tools. It has always been a challenge for the teachers to assess creative work in higher education. In relation, the assessment of how products create user experience in student works requires extra attention. In this paper, we discuss the difficulty of properly assessing design and explain the development and application of rubrics that we aimed to facilitate the assessment of design for user experience assignments of a 3rd year bachelors’ course of the University of Twente. We present evidence of the reliability and validity of the assessment through the rubrics. Usability of the rubrics for assessment purposes has also been addressed.