Discovering User Needs for UX. 3 credits, 3 contact hours

Catalog description

What new digital products or services need to be developed? How do you anticipate someone’s needs before they do? How do you understand how people interact with products? These are key questions that both interaction designers and start-up entrepreneurs need to answer. It’s all about understanding the user. We need to work with users to investigate or "research" their needs and how they interact with the product or service. In this course, we take a deep dive into qualitative user experience (UX) research. UX research is the process of understanding why and how people use products and services. This course will teach you a set of research tools to discover user needs, investigate the user experience, and enhance the user experience by deriving design recommendations. We will cover techniques like ethnography, focus groups, interviewing, and analyzing qualitative data. We will be talking with user experience researchers at major companies and getting involved with actual user research. This practical, hands-on course will give you an insight into the psychology of user behavior and lay the foundation for students who are pursuing careers designing, evaluating, or marketing products for people.