VICTORIA
WÅNSANDER
VICTORIA
WÅNSANDER
After three years there are over 100 graduated UX professionals.
This is the story of how I became the highest student rated teacher at IT Högskolan.
And how I created three UX courses from the ground up, while being responsible for teaching students the knowledge and skills needed to graduate as UX professionals
UX Teaching • UX Research • Business strategy • Usability testing • Agile Methods
• Service Design
At the International IT-College of Sweden, I have been responsible for the creation, teaching and examination of the courses Business Value With design, User centered
design and Agile Methods.
I designed the curriculum for these courses from scratch and have over the course of the last three years taught and guided 100+ students in the areas of user research, customer journeys, personas, usability testing in lab environment, analyzing findings, communicating findings and prototyping solutions to address the identified usability problems.
visit iths.se
What are the most important knowledge and skills for future UX professionals to learn?
- Hi Victoria, we got UX students but nothing to teach them.
Late summer in 2020, I got the opportunity to ask myself two questions:
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"What are the most important knowledge and skills for UX students to learn?"
-
"How can I teach them those tings?".
I was now responsible for students and UX courses, but there was no currucilum or material. It all needed to be created. And the time was not on my side- I had a couple of weeks until the day of the first lecture.
If i only knew then what I know now. I would never had used that first power point presentation.
Now, it's only four main ingredients during my classes: my students, me, curiousuty and a whiteboard.
Business Value with Design
It's a grey morning during the covid pandemic. I met my students for the first time. I wish I knew then what I know now.
What I learned from all of hours teaching, choaching and examining my students is the most important thing for me is to remove all the buzz and go straight to the core. In the course "Business Value with Design" it was straight forward. Teach the students the skills in order for them to show the impact of design. Teach them to formulate and presenate the target users, get them to excell in their skills to presentate how small changes in the UI can improve the business value, both in numbers and in reputation.
Some things I learned my students during the course:
• Personas and other types of representations of target users
• Customer Journey Mapping
• Presentation and argumentation skills
User Centered Design
"Designing without knowing what problem to solve and for whom is like trying to hit a target while being blindfolded."
- Said Victoria during one of her classes.
It all comes back to the users and their needs. They won't use our products for the sake of just using them. The products we design are just tools people use to reach their goals. They don't use your phone to make a call. They use the phone to reach someone.
We need to find out what our target group's needs and goals are so that we create a seamless experience for them when they need to have their needs met and goals achieved.
Some things my students learned during the course:
• How to formulate survey and interview questions
• How to understand the core needs and motivations of our users
• How to think when you realize you asked the wrong questions
• Strategies for when to collect quantitative vs qualitative data
• Analyse qualitative and quantitative data
• Presentate insights and findings from the research
• Plan, conduct and analyse usability studies
• How to behave during a testing session
• Digital vs physical testing
• How to measure usability
• How to measure the impact of design
• How to know when our design is "good enough"
• Best strategies when presenting insights to stakeholders
• Understand the underlying needs of the target group
• Design decisions should be based on knowledge, not personal preferences
Agile methods
"Let your team know your limits"
How do UX designers work in an agile environment? It's different everywhere but the core is to understand transparency, communication and learning along the way.
How can designers both be working with concepts of tomorrow while and the same time supporting developers during the development process?
Some things my students learned during the course:
• Agile vs Waterfall methods (of course, it's the basics)
• Foundations of Scrum
• User stories, definition of done
• Solve problems while working in Scrum- teams (Sprint Planning, Daily Standups, Retrospectives, Sprint Demos)
• What the UX designer's role is in the agile environment
• The process of working with Trello and other tools
• Plan and conduct design workshops
• Conflict management
• Argumentation
• Presentation skills
