Creating a product design course for a non-design school
We created a new design course at UC San Diego to help students prepare for product design internships and careers. After interviewing for and working in design internships, we noticed gaps in our school’s curriculum which made it hard for students, even after graduation, to be considered for these types of roles. Many of the students we spoke to felt unprepared because classes focus on theory rather than transferable skills or career prep. For example, less than half of UCSD Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) graduates have a design portfolio.
Our mission was to create a new design course that was relentlessly practical, as opposed to the more theoretical approaches taken by other design courses. In this course, we set out to help design students hone their product/interaction/visual design skills, enhance their storytelling ability for case studies, and work on creating relevant solutions for present-day problems. The end deliverable for each student was a case study of their teams’ design process (their research, product decisions, and design decisions).
We have two articles about this class–in this one, we talk about why we started the class, a high-level overview of the content, and the results/suggestions we have for university UX programs. The second is a deep dive into the content and assignments we included as part of the class.
Why does practical education matter?
Practicality vs theory. HCI courses at at many universities (such as UCSD) focus heavily on academic skills like analyzing research papers, user research methods, low fidelity UX work, and programming. This strong focus on research and low fidelity prototypes is an issue because students leave with projects that are only half-finished in the eyes of employers. To get a job, students must demonstrate they can define a problem statement, conduct research, use findings to create wireframes and eventually build high fidelity interactive prototypes. Additionally, all of this work has to be distilled into a concise and heavily branded writeup to attract the attention of recruiters.
This means that students have to do a significant amount of the heavy lifting, such as the high fidelity work and project write-up, on their own time. This challenge is even harder for first-generation college students, a large part of the student body at UCSD, who rely almost exclusively on courses to prepare them for their careers. Many of our peers only realized the gaps between the work they had and what was required to get an internship during their junior and senior years — and at that point felt overwhelmed by the amount of work they needed to do to catch up. We believe that for HCI students there must be a mix of both academic material and practical project-based content to help them succeed. With this class, we chose to focus on 3 major gaps in the curriculum that we believe if addressed will help students better prepare for industry.
Design Portfolio: To get a UX job the most basic requirement is having a portfolio with at least 1 project writeup. The end deliverable for our course will be a published site with a case study of their work over the quarter.
Design/product decisions: UX designers are not graphic designers and cannot design in a vacuum. There are constraints on both the customer and the business side. Students should be able to show multiple solutions to a problem and explain why, using user research or product constraints, etc, they chose a specific solution.
High fidelity design: Final projects must be at an extremely high fidelity that students would be proud to show employers. Most students in the HCI program have little to no visual design experience so this was very important. UX students compete with graphic designers for job positions so their work must be at least up to par with industry standards. To help students with this part we encouraged them to use existing design systems.
High-level overview of the course
We published another article, where you can find an in-depth overview of the content we taught. In short, to address the aforementioned gaps in the curriculum there were 3 main components to the class.
Scoped out projects: We asked our students to extend or redesign a feature of a widely-used mobile app. This forced students to work from a starting point (as opposed to making an app from scratch) within real-world constraints (reflecting actual product development processes). These apps also had publicly accessible design systems so students with little visual design experience could still build high fidelity prototypes.
Design tools: By utilizing Figma for project deliverables we ensured that students could collaborate with their team and that everyone knew the basics of the design tool. We intentionally kept the class code free so students could devote their focus towards creating the best user experience rather than one that would be feasible to code within a few weeks.
Portfolio building: Our principal goal of the course was to have every student exit the course with a design portfolio and a compelling design case study that they could be proud to show off in an interview. To achieve this, we used a hybrid approach to portfolio building by requiring students to complete the major design work in teams, but assigning the final portfolios and case studies as individual work.
How did we do?
Over 80 students completed the course in teams of 3–4 people. At the end of each quarter students anonymously review the classes they took and the statistics we saw were encouraging. Similar project-based design courses at UCSD received, on average, an 84% recommendation from its students. Our course received a 97% rating and will be offered again next fall.
While we’d love to conduct a more formal survey in the future, initial polls and conversations with students showed that over 10% of the class successfully got an internship offer based in part on their class project and many more are actively interviewing. We had a conversation when we designing the course that it would be amazing if at least one student received an internship and we are so excited that it has benefited many students.
While we are proud of the first iteration of this course, there are still many areas we can improve:
Design critiques: Due to time constraints we limited our critiques to weekly one-on-one sessions with teams and their assigned TA. However, this format is not representative of the types of design critiques most design teams host because multiple people give feedback. In future iterations of the class, we would love to see more peer involvement in critiques. This is an area other classes at UCSD excel at and we think it could be easily adopted in our course.
Stronger product focus: Designers build products with meaning, not to just make them look nice. There should be a stronger emphasis on the business rationale behind our student’s designs. This could potentially be solved through lectures on this topic or mini assignments like Figma labs (short assignments where students learned Figma by recreating screens of existing apps).
If you are an educator…
Education has to be both practical and academic. If a 10-week bootcamp from General Assembly can prepare its students for careers in design, there is no reason for students graduating from a 4-year program to lack the skills and struggle to land a design position. These recommendations are targeted toward HCI and design curriculum in general-purpose universities like ours that are not specifically design schools.
Project-based classes should focus on one project and be available to freshmen and sophomores. The quarter system at schools like UCSD is fast-paced, so requiring more than one project leads to incomplete designs that are not “portfolio ready.” Students need to be able to take their projects from a concept to the finish line because they are expected to do this in industry. It is important that first and second-year students can take these classes so they can begin getting feedback on their portfolios and work as soon as possible. The closer to graduation, the more daunting the task seems.
Students in HCI programs should be required to take visual design courses. This would tie in well with the existing curriculum and would help young designers brand themselves to compete with graphic designers. This is very important, at non-design schools, because the visual arts departments and HCI programs are typically not connected.
If you are teaching an HCI course and have comments or want to know more about our process please reach out to us and also check out our other article which goes more in-depth about the content. We would love to hear your opinions and even help implement a similar offering in your school.
Students, if you go to UCSD, or a school with a similar HCI program and agree with some of the points we talked about, such as the need for practical education, please send this article to your teaching staff. Also, feel free to reach out to us to give us suggestions, we want to make this class better for future students and would like to hear your thoughts.
This class wouldn’t be possible without the support & guidance of Professor Philip Guo and out fellow TA Sean Kross. Shout out to Andy Reed for feedback on this article and Pablo Stanley for illustrations. Finally, thank you to all the students to gave us honest feedback throughout the course and to the students who offered their work to be a part of this article.
Rajiv Sancheti is a 4th-year Human-Computer Interaction student at UCSD. He previously designed search experiences at Airbnb and is headed to Zumper as a KPCB Design Fellow.
David Wu is a Product Designer at Lyft who recently graduated from UCSD’s Human-Computer Interaction program. He has previously designed driver pay experiences at Lyft and B2B healthcare products at Komodo Health.
