Teaching

As a design research 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, UC Berkeley's School of Information, Intro to UX Design (Info 213), Fall 2022, Fall 2023 Fall 2024

  • Adjunct, UC Berkeley's School of Information, Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation (DES INV 15), Spring 2024

  • 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 2024

Course OVerview

This course covers the fundamentals of user experience (UX) design. UX is defined as, “A person's perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service”. These fundamentals include an introduction to:

  • The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

  • The end-to-end human-centered design process of identifying a design problem and iteratively designing a solution that is both useful and usable to your target audience.

  • How human-centered design fits within the broader context of product development.

All coursework is designed to teach you core skills you will need as a UX practitioner in industry. By the end of this course, you will have practiced:

  • Designing a useful and usable technology solution for your target audience.

  • Communicating your design process, including how to effectively justify your design decisions.

  • Working in interdisciplinary teams to accomplish shared goals.

Skills taught

  • Defining problem space: Envision potential futures we can design for using Futures Thinking approaches. Consider the values and incentives of multiple stakeholders within problem space. Identify unmet user needs via design research methods such as observation, interviewing and contextual inquiry; make sense of your data through generating Personas, Jobs-to-be-Done, and user journeys. 

  • Generating ideas for potential design solutions: Learn approaches to diverge and converge on potential solutions, such as how to run an effective brainstorming session. Develop and apply prioritization criteria to inform which solutions you’ll subsequently prototype. Practice developing a clear connection between the problem you seek to solve for people and your ideas. 

  • Prototyping at different levels of fidelity: Understand  when, why and how to create low versus high-fidelity prototypes. We will use Figma, a freely available design software.

  • Design solution evaluation: Learn how to test if your concept is useful and usable, through techniques such as concept testing, usability testing, and usability inspection methods (e.g., heuristic analysis, cognitive walkthrough). 

  • Communication: Practice how to effectively communicate your design process to different types of stakeholders using storytelling. Learn how to reflect on and communicate your design decisions (i.e., the “why” behind why you made certain design choices), and prepare a strong portfolio and case study for industry UX roles.

  • Collaboration: How to effectively work with an interdisciplinary team, including giving and receiving constructive feedback.  

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. Regular design critique (“crit”) is a key part of the course, to practice how to effectively ask for/receive feedback on work-in-progress.

Week 1: Introduction

Week 2: Getting Started - Design Practices to Drive Innovation

  • Defining problem space: Engage in Futures Thinking to explore potential futures. Work backwards from preferable futures to identify problem spaces we can tackle within the scope of the course.

Week 3: Observation - User Experience Research Foundation

  • Practice an interview: Form groups of three, practice interviewing each other on a set topic and iterating on your discussion guide.

Week 4: Sensemaking - Turn Insights into Actionable Deliverables

  • 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: Solution Space - Ideation and Storyboarding

  • Storyboard: Brainstorm in a group and create storyboards representing different ideas related to a set topic.

Week 6: Prototyping - Build Low-fidelity Prototypes

  • Paper prototypes: Sketch and build paper prototypes for your final projects.

Week 7: Visual Design - Usability and Aesthetic Appeal of your Design

  • Critique: Analyze and present critiques of two website for the presence/absence of the laws of UX and visual design.

Week 8: Prototyping - Build Hi-fidelity Prototypes

  • Figma prototypes: Iterate on your paper prototypes and create high-fi prototypes using Figma.

Week 9: Evaluation - Usability Testing

  • Usability test: Work in groups of three and conduct two usability tests on two given websites.

Week 10: Evaluation - Usability Inspection Methods

  • Heuristic evaluation: Conduct a heuristic evaluation on a given website.

Week 11: Ethics and Politics of Design

  • Values assessment: Use the Tarot Cards of Tech to assess the ethics and potential impacts and harms of your final project.

Week 12: Communicate - Telling the Story of your Design

  • Design document: Create a deck that tells the story of your design, and can serve as a portfolio piece beyond the course.

Week 13: Special Topic - Designing for AI

Week 14: Guest Lecturers - UX Practitioners from Industry

Week 15: Final Presentations

KEY RESOURCES

Acknowledgements

Special thank you to Niloufar Salehi (Fall 2022 co-instructor), Evan Peck, James Landay, Michael Bernstein.