Fixing The 2 Key Problems in CX/UX Education
Nearly all UX education courses, programs, degrees, videos, and more are making the same mistakes. We show people inputs. We show them artifacts, maps, documents, designs, and other completed outputs. We give them some guidelines, tips, do this, don’t do this, try this, consider this, and remember this. Here’s a checklist, mnemonic, canvas, or template.
We expect that to be enough for our students to now do high-quality critical thinking work that requires creativity, deductive reasoning, logic, and being a Low Ego Action Hero™.
We expect them to reverse engineer the outputs.
We can all debate on what should people learn to work in UX. Most experienced UX veterans mostly already agree on this, which means what to teach isn’t our key problem. How we’re teaching is the real problem.
Instructors rarely walk slowly through an example to show how the outputs were created.
I want to watch experienced instructors doing the work, not just telling me broadly about the work. I want to see how and where they use science, technique, and strategy. I want to watch them explain:
- What data, knowledge, or something else did they start with?
- Where did they start?
- What questions did they ask themselves at which points?
- Where did they have to make a decision and how did they approach the decision?
- If they feel stuck, what do they do?
- When do they lean on other teammates for help or collaboration?
- What are some of their tools, workarounds, cheat sheets, etc., and where in their process do they tend to use them?
Behold the power of having someone think out loud. I want to watch my instructor do the work. I want to learn their technique, thought process, how they approach decisions, where they ran into an obstacle, and how they solved it.
Imagine we want to teach someone interaction design.
We might tell them:
- Remember to use good visual hierarchy.
- Make it accessible.
- Focus on the task at hand.
- Use previous research to guide and inform you.
- Try some of those Gestalt Principles.
- Consider NN/g heuristics.
- Avoid The Four Horsemen of Bad UX®: frustration, confusion, disappointment, and distraction.
- Keep simplifying so that the user’s task is efficient.
In the current model of UX education, we next say: And now you try it.
That student will be guessing. Did we set them up for success or did we give them Minimum Viable Instruction?
Compare that to:
- All of the above tips and info, plus…
- Now you’re going to watch your instructor do an example, preferably more than one. Let’s go to one of those design challenge generators and pick something this instructor didn’t know was coming, and let’s see this person tackle this. They’ll think out loud and take questions as they go. We’ll have to pretend we did great research and are working from those findings. The instructor would indicate when they’d expect to work from research or an output of a previous task in the UCD process.
Version 2 sets the student up for success. Version 2 teaches people to fish. Version 1 hands students a fishing rod, various bait (pick the right one!), a disassembled fishing reel they’ll have to put together, a hook, a feather, various weights (pick the right one!), various gauges of fishing line (pick the right one!), and a bobber… and asks that they catch a full dinner.
I’m calling version 2 “Think Out Loud.” We want research participants to think out loud. We learn more from them and we see what ideas went into their process. Let’s demand the same thing from our instructors.
Instructors would have to be able to do this work at an expert level.
We have huge problems with “UX” boot camps, programs, and even university degree courses hiring unqualified people to teach UX. If courses required instructors to teach-by-doing in slow motion, thinking out loud, and explaining as they go, schools couldn’t get away with hiring people who can’t do the work. Visual designers, front-end developers, creative directors, and people who haven’t worked in UX research and/or architecture and design for 5+ years wouldn’t be hired to teach UX foundations, research, or architecture/design.
“Think Out Loud” would eliminate unqualified instructors who are not able to do the work expertly and slow down their thinking and process enough to Think Out Loud. They will need to explain what they are doing as they go, why they did it, what else they could have done, etc.
When I say “instructor,” I mean anybody who plays any role in teaching you or reviewing your work during your education. This means instructors, professors, teaching assistants, tutors, coaches, and others a school or program assigns to help you learn and improve.
Any instructor can read from a script and tell you how you could do the work. But can they show you how to do the work by doing it live, explaining as they go, and taking questions? Having that as a standard for instructors would change who gets hired to teach, assistant teach, tutor, mentor, coach, etc.
“Think Out Loud” would shift how UX is taught and learned.
Learning could now look like this:
Step 1: Get your foundation UX information wherever you want. Videos, books, bootcamps, courses, private coaching, universities, etc.
Step 2: Before you guess at applying that knowledge, take courses where the instructor Thinks Out Loud and is able to show you multiple examples of the work being done… by doing it live.
Step 3: Now it’s time for you to apply this knowledge and practice. This might be a sample/fake project or it could be a real project. Do not do this alone. You might be guessing. Even non-profits looking for free work are looking for work to be done really well. You need an expert coach who can review your work. (I am available for coaching but please select anybody you like who can give you expert feedback.) You need tough love feedback that will help you improve. You need to know where you might be applying knowledge incorrectly.
Peer-to-peer feedback isn’t enough, especially while you are new to something. It’s why we don’t ask someone who just started learning the piano to give us feedback on our piano skills.
Step 4: Now you’re ready for an apprenticeship where you can continue practicing with real work and frequent coaching and expert feedback.
Step 5: After an apprenticeship or two, you will have enough practice, coaching, and real-world experience to qualify for a junior job. Yes, unfortunately, most workplaces understand UX just well enough to know that they don’t want a super newbie. Most companies don’t want to train you to do this work. They expect developers, marketers, UX, and others to show up already knowing how to do this work (at a junior level).
In my opinion, there is no good reason to “practice” UX work without being coached. You took piano lessons. You went to yoga class. You want to learn and have your work reviewed by experts who will help you do great work and level up.
This revised process will send more educated, skilled, and capable CX/UX practitioners to their first jobs. They will be job-ready.
It’s November 2021: Does any school or program meet this standard?
Not that I’ve found. But start looking for it and asking for it. If your teacher can’t do the work, why learn from them? If your instructor isn’t going to show you step-by-step how to apply knowledge and principles through real or example work, why learn from them?
I believe this will shape new standards for UX education.
- Programs with “Think Out Loud” instruction will be on another level from those hoping you will magically reverse engineer how UX work is really done.
- Programs with “Think Out Loud” instructors will be on another level from those hoping that you won’t mind never being shown, step-by-step, how an experienced professional — maybe even a specialist — approaches CX and UX tasks.
I am so tired of seeing programs with assignments like (and these are real):
- Watch some videos and then design a new flight booking website.
- Read this article and then create a research plan.
- Run a survey and then design an app to help college students pursue better nutrition (said no college student ever).
- Read these sources and then find low-literacy people living on disability to interview them.
All of these change or die when “Think Out Loud” instruction starts becoming the norm. We won’t give people some inputs and expect them to figure out how to get to the outputs. We will show them how.
This might also change who moves into a CX/UX career.
Right now, too many programs make it seem like UX is easy to do. Make some maps, fill in these templates, guess at a good design, boom, you’re doing UX. Go find a job and make endless piles of money.
Once people see what really goes into UX work (and that’s it not all catered lunches and sticky notes), they might decide it’s not for them. I’m OK with that. The sooner someone finds out a career isn’t right for them, the sooner they can move towards the one that is.
“Think Out Loud” will be a new series on my YouTube channel starting 15 Nov 2021.
I made a playlist. These episodes will be completely improvised. I will work live and I will take suggestions from the live audience on what data we should pretend we have. For example, if it’s a design challenge, what should I assume we learned in research? The audience can put that in chat, and I will have to work using those insights.
Can your instructor do that? They should be able to. Demand more from instructors, even when courses are free or cheap.
Bonus: our Micro Lessons playlist teaches various UX tasks and techniques, especially in research.
Ads on are some of our videos to help in the YouTube algorithm (hey, YouTube wants to make money). Each month, I will give $50 USD to charity or our YouTube ad revenue, whichever is higher, to a charity.
