Austin Community College

Role: Associate Professor, User Experience Design
Skills: Teaching/Instruction/Demonstration, Curriculum Development, Student Advising, Event Organization
The Challenge: Launch the new UX degree and effectively teach the new UX courses, build out the remaining UX courses with the help of industry professionals, assign the right instructors to best teach each course, and make a major impact on the student population with the new program.
Results: The UX degree was launched on schedule and the new students and transfer students from the previous degree were successfully enrolled in the new degree. New courses were effectively taught through appropriate staffing and yielded impressive student work. Our department’s first promotional event, the UX Hackathon, was a great success allowing industry professionals and ACC students to work together.

Launching the New Degree
We officially launched the new A.A.S. User Experience Degree at ACC in the Fall of 2015. This new degree replaced the existing Web and Interactive Design degree.

We began teaching the new courses within the new program, and taking the students on a journey through the world of UX. We started them with an introductory Survey of UX course that we staffed with industry adjunct to give students the most current overview of the industry, help them get their feet wet, and get them excited about the field. This strategy worked well.

As the students progressed through the course work they encountered first level courses like Prototyping, UI Design, and Responsive Web, learning the basic skills and tools they needed before they landed in the User Experience Design 1 course, which was one of the courses that I developed.

User Experience Design 1
In the UX1 course the students are introduced to a user-centered design process, specifically, the Goal-Directed Design Process put forth by Alan Cooper in his book “About Face”.

As they progressed through this design process they were taught about the various stages of the process and tasked with a project that would enable them to put into practice what they have learned for that stage. Essentially, the course work was an intermediate level UX project that the students were tasked with executing throughout each segment of the course.

To illustrate the outcome of this course, I have included a link to a portfolio site that belongs to one of my students. The portfolio piece that is presented here is the final outcome of working through the User Experience Design 1 course that I have just described.

Student: Prerna Sunderraman
Portfolio Piece from UX1 Class:
https://prernasunderraman.myportfolio.com/home-smart-home

Event Organization
I had the pleasure of planning, organizing, and running ACC’s first UX Hackathon for the Visual Communication department during the 2016 Spring Semester.

This event took place almost two semesters after launching the new UX Degree, so it was a fantastic opportunity to promote the new degree within ACC, give students easy access and exposure to an event like this, and promote the degree to the local industry in Austin by inviting and involving them in the event.

This one night event took place at ACC’s new Highland Campus and involved our students as participants and local industry professionals as mentors. We ended up with six student teams and around 10-15 industry mentors who rotated in throughout the evening. It was a great success.