COLLABORATIVE LEARNING BETWEEN DESIGNERS & DEVELOPERS

User experience (UX) designers in industry create design prototypes and hand them off to software developers to implement in code which is returned to the designers for feedback. Typically, designers follow an iterative cycle comprising the circle of design, prototype, and test. This cycle is repeated until the product meets the desired user experience.

Unfortunately, when we teach UX design in Information Schools, no such handoff or feedback takes place in the classroom. Instead, UX instructors simulate the process with assignments and instructor feedback. UX students are concerned with psychology and principles of art and design to make digital artifacts usable and accessible, but their projects may be infeasible without looping in Computer Science (CS) feedback. CS students are concerned with technical feasibility of digital artifacts. They effectively and efficiently develop digital artifacts that minimize bugs but may build projects that ignore user concerns. I propose to engage existing software development classes in CNS to forge a two-way tie to design challenges. I propose to implement the Designer-Developer Collaboration in the UX Prototyping course with a total of 20 students per semester in the School of Information. Both a class in Computer Science (with 60 students) and the UX Prototyping class will be told in the syllabus that they will be jointly evaluated by the two instructors. Teams composed of a designer and four developers will work together to design and develop iOS apps. The UX Prototyping students will design the apps, making nonfunctional prototypes that depict the look and feel of the apps. The CS students will develop functional prototypes in the Swift programming language based on but compromising with the nonfunctional prototypes. The resulting apps are meant to be useful and usable.