Questions on design education are some of the most frequently asked questions we hear. University degrees, certifications, boot camps – there are a lot of options competing for your money and time. Which should you choose? Our special guest Angela Schmeidel Randall has years of university experience teaching students UX design. She provides helpful advice on not only evaluating UX educational paths, but also the need to evaluate yourself, too! This is part one of a two-part episode.
Helpful Links
TopUXSchool.com – Visit Kaiting Huang’s very thorough website indexing university UX programs and online courses. It’s an amazing resource!
UX.training – Evaluate your UX skills with Angela’s free assessment. Identifying your strengths and weaknesses can help prioritize and inform your career development.
More Ascend UX Content
Visit the Ascend UX podcast’s website for more episodes.
Contact Us
We love your questions and feedback! Please send them to ascendux@pros.com. We read every message and may use your question in a future show.
Ayan Bihi or Evan Sunwall are always happy to connect with listeners on LinkedIn. Just add a note mentioning the show in your invitation.
Credits
Thanks to Ultravice and Lakey Inspired for the use of their music.
Thanks to our producer and editor Brandon Robinson.
This show is created by PROS and the PROS UX Team.
Copyright 2020 Ascend UX. All rights reserved.
Evan: [00:00:37] Howdy friends. This is the ascend UX podcast. A show about the experience of user experience design. I'm Evan Sunwall.
Ayan: [00:00:44] And I am Ayan Bihi. So Evan, I don't know about you, but I often find myself having conversations with people and they naturally lead towards becoming an interview. I share this because I recently had a flashback of one of these moments the other day, where I found myself chatting with the grandchildren of my mother's best [00:01:00] friend.
And they were really excited. They're were telling me about their favorite video games that they love to play on their parents' phone and how they work. So as we were talking, I had an idea to play naive. So I decided to say, hold on guys, wait, you've been talking about the internet, but what is this thing?
The internet, everybody talks to me about it. What is it? So their little excited faces dropped as if they could not understand how someone did not understand yet alone know what was the intranet? Interesting to see how they themselves try to understand what the internet was beyond the realm of the games in their parents' phone.
So with some patients on both their end and mine, they went about describing as something that was similar to a physical product that was made and distributed from a factory that you're able to buy and use, as you wished. So this exercise, I don't know, it was really fun because it allowed them to take a step back from their everyday interaction with the internet and try to understand how it works, not just, and not just what allowed them to do.
I don't know if you ever had experiences like that. Evan, where you yourself, tried to take a step back and try to understand how a product in your everyday life [00:02:00] works, or if you ever had exchanges with people where you just like, Hey, so wait, what's this about.
Evan: [00:02:04] I, I have a lot of that experience with my five year old son where I asked him to explain something and talk about a tool that is using a piece of software or just an experience.
And just like just the, just the innocence, right? Just like I have no idea. I just, all I can take is the inputs that I see and I put them together in a way that makes sense. And it's, it's really fascinating. I'm struggling right now in the moment, trying to think of a, of a situation where I was just astounded by bye.
How he described something, but it's, it's kind of, it's kind of really amazing because it's like, you don't know all the details and all the mechanics of how something comes together. And, you know, I think, I think at some way, cause we're trying to, I'm trying to think about how UX education is a little bit of this, of this kind of theme, because.
It could be like this giant black box for people. I think when I, when I talked to, when I talked to [00:03:00] folks at conferences, when I talked to folks at Houston, new UXPA events, uh, local, regional, uh, professional society. It's it's easily top three question. And it's like, well, you know, what I see is a lot of advertising for courses.
I see a lot of these services that, that teach UX, they'll help you get that job. And all you see is that kind of experience. And it's like, but you know, the deeper issues, the things that actually kind of really matter. To making that good choice. They don't, they don't, they're not aware that maybe they're doing some other job right now and it's just, it's just not clear.
And so they see, like I do A to B to C and you know, I'll end up here and that will work. Right? It's like, well, no, there's, there's a lot more nuance to that. And, you know, I think, I think it's unnecessarily complex. It's unfortunately complex right now where we at we're in the, in the maturity of the industry and, uh, yeah, it's.
It's funny and it's, it's interesting. And it's so, Hmm. I don't know a little sad for me too. It's unnecessarily frustrating. How did you react when you heard their answer?
Ayan: [00:04:12] Well, I thought it was really cute actually, that they took something that was so abstract and they related it back to something that they could figure out it was for them.
They go to the store, they pick up this package, which is the internet and they unravel it and they go play with it. So I thought it was a really fun exercise and I think that's a part, what we do everyday in our field as designers, we have to kind of retro engineer to understand how things work. But I think this could be a really interesting exercise for people who are not designers also to just kind of take a step back and try to understand how the world around us works.
And perhaps also the people who conceptualize that experience that you have either with a product or service.
Evan: [00:04:49] Yeah.Listening, just asking just step. Yeah. Stepping back, asking some questions. It's like, what do you think? Like probing a little more instead of, uh, uh, you know, just trying to explain or otherwise, like that's not right.
You know, it's actually like more like this, but really listening and just taking, uh, taking a breath, uh, is a pretty powerful technique
Ayan: [00:05:09] yeah. To listen, to observe. And I guess that just leads to learning, the endless experience of learning. So today on the topic of learning, we'll be discussing an important topic in UX education.
So for those currently in the field, or wishing to get into UX, it can be very overwhelming to decide on which educational path to take from the bevy of university degrees, certifications, boot camps, massive online courses. There are a lot of educational options available today. Fortunately, we have a special guest to help us today.
Angela Schmeidel Randall has more than a decade of consulting and over 20 years in the User Experience Industry as is the founding principal at Normal Modes and UX training, she and her team provide outside research, coaching, and training to organizations that want to improve experiences with their products and services.
She specializes in complex data driven mission, critical experiences with clients, including fortune 100 companies. Government agencies, venture backed startups in a variety of industries. Angela is a graduate of university of St. Thomas and Rice university. She's also a graduate of Rices Dewar Institute for new leaders.
Angela currently teaches at Kent state university's graduate degree program for User Experience Design. And at Lilly Rice university is Jones school of business. Her mission is to change the world one experience at a time. Welcome Angela. Thank you for joining us today.
Angela: [00:06:32] Thank you for having me.
Ayan: [00:06:34] So first question, how might students or younger people evaluate university UX programs today?
What are the most important variables for you to help somebody to distinguish what could be the right program for them?
Angela: [00:06:46] Well, I mean, I think personally it's not a one size fits all approach. It's something that you need to first, if you're a student, you need to think, okay, what is my ex, where do I, where I am I take day?
What sort of skills and experience do I have today? And for somebody who is maybe an undergrad who doesn't really, and maybe in a liberal arts type of program, right. Their undergrad and history, which there are a whole lot. Yeah. And those kinds of UX people existing today. That that background is a lot different than say somebody who's got a PhD in applied cognitive psychology, like the skills and experiences there, or somebody who's coming out of an associates program in visual design, those depending on where you're at, um, we'll help direct you to where you want to be.
So, you know, if, let's let's talk about the PhDs and applied cognitive psychology. Cause there are a lot of them. Um, and so yeah, a lot of times they have the tremendous amount of human factors experience. They have a tremendous amount of experience conducting research. And so, you know, when we think about UX, we think of generally two types of, [00:08:00] of people we think of designers and we think of researchers.
And so those applied cognitive psychologists make really good researchers with some caveats. And so I want to focus on that UX research pathway, but those people that are coming out of maybe an associates program and visual design. You know, they're going to want to start out in the visual design world and go down that path.
So it's really a matter of, knowing where you are first and evaluate where you are, understanding what your persona is. And then, um, what you're going to be doing is you're going to look at programs to see how can I supplement my education so that, you know, person from the associate's program, you know, eventually I think one of the things that would be nice for them is to get some.
Some supplemental training, you know, open market training. You don't have to go to a university for this on user experience, similar targeted training, because it's going to be easier for them to move into a design job because they're already, they already have a beautiful portfolio. They need to get some supplemental training, maybe in technology or supplemental training and research or some supplemental training and, or ethnography, identifying those blind spots or those, you know, the spots in their education that they're missing is important and then in the case of the applied cognitive psychologist, a lot of that is going to be going back and immersing oneself in the applied world of working inside of an organization.
Academia is a hugely different beast than what you get trained for at a PhD program is hugely different than what you could get trained for and maybe an associates program. So you need to look and see like, what are the gaps in my education? The other thing about this PCs is like it's Diane Kruger, right.
You know, a lot about one thing, but sometimes you have a really hard time [00:10:00] understanding what you don't know. That there are things that you don't know. You know, I find that the PhD programs and then also the military, you know, they're not always as good at identifying what they don't know,
Evan: [00:10:15] with kind of a goal about, it sounds like, you know, research like really heavy UX oriented research in terms of like talking with users, maybe doing some statistics, uh, doing ethnography and, or maybe design oriented careers, UX oriented careers, where they're really heavy on the prototyping and design and conceptualization, your visual design skills.
Does it seem like two kind of major tracks to kind of focus as kind of a goal in the UX realm? Because they're a little distinctive.
Angela: [00:10:46] Yeah. I mean, I think, if you think about, you know, which box do I submit inside of? Do I fit in the designer box or do I fit, and in general? There's, there's exceptions to this and we'll talk about third one in a minute, [00:11:00] but do I fit in the designer box or do I fit in, um, the researcher box?
And so understanding like which one you're starting out at and then evaluating programs based on where you want to go. So like I teach at Kent State, I teach and a Masters of User Experience design program, and it is run out of the information school, which used to be the library science at Kent state.
And, and I'm not speaking on behalf of Kent state at this point. Um, So our program tends to be very rich in research and ethnography and information architecture and design patterns and you know, that sort of thing. And our program's very strong in that area. So if you need to supplement your education with those kinds of areas, that's a good fit for you. So it's a good overview fit too [00:12:00] anytime you can get a master's degree that confers upon it, some legitimacy, that sort of thing.
Evan: [00:12:05] So evaluating those programs, there would be taking stock of what you've got right now. Whether it be, I have a little, yeah, little technology I can code a little bit, or maybe I've, I've done some cognitive psychology I've run studies, or maybe I have really great visual design skills.
Take stock of the skills you have. But if you, if you're going to pursue further education or making a decision of like what your bachelor's should be or something like that, how do you evaluate programs that you may be looking at university kind of programs? How do you evaluate them? Because it's really confusing, right?
It's hard to even find because it's so many different labels. How do you figure that out? How do you, how do you identify? Oh, that's maybe a good match for me or what I want to, I want to focus on.
Angela: [00:12:46] There aren't a whole lot of UX programs because UX is like this strange interdisciplinary beast, especially there's not any at the undergraduate level though there's a lot of interest, I think at this [00:13:00] point from students about getting undergraduate education in User Experience, I I've anecdotally heard that I've heard that from, you know, high school students, that sort of thing. So there is that sort of interest there. There aren't very many master's programs and what those master's programs,excel at varies.
And so based on where you are, you want to select a program that meets that need.
Evan: [00:13:28] So like, uh, what are the major, what are the major schools that tend to house UX programs? At least the United States. Oh,
Angela: [00:13:36] Oh Evan. You're going to have me do research. I'm going to have to Google,
Evan: [00:13:39] Alright, so the ones I, okay. All right.
I'll I'll I'll, I'll do one better for you. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw this out there. If people want to know, at least the United States programs. What is out there cause it's a little daunting top www.topuxschools.com. That is, is a great resource. It's a Google designer made it. It's really impressive. It's a pretty [00:14:00] comprehensive listing of all different programs, online courses, master's degree programs and everything.
Check it out. It's really neat. And it can kind of link you out to the different schools and give you even the pricing of, of everything. It's really cool. It's a crazy, it's a crazy, awesome UX. I love that a UX designer like looked at this and like, I want to make a system to kind of improve this user experience of like, how the heck do I learn more about user experience?
I love that. So check that out anyway. Uh,
Angela: [00:14:29] Oh yeah, this is awesome. Um, I'm there now. Um,
Yeah, I mean some of it. I mean, there's, you know, human computer interaction is a good pathway. If you want to be a researcher, typically human computer interaction is in the applied cognitive psychology program or an applied psychology program, some interaction design masters. You know, if you want to be an information architect, a library science degree, isn't bad.
There's a subset of UX that doesn't get talked about and it's UX for libraries,librarians are on it in terms of UX and, and, and really kind of driving, um, some of the activity, but the two schools of thought don't typically match. I have an assessment on UX.Training that will go in and it's free and we'll go in and it help you evaluate what skills you have and what your capabilities are.
And it's based on something Ravi and I had worked on and I just took in like, ran with it and what it does is it says, okay, this is, these are the areas of expertise inside of UX. And here's like the foundational knowledge. Here's the stuff you need to be a leader, which to be a leader, you don't have to be very far into your career. You can be a leader very early in your career by having good work habits and self-awareness and that sort of thing. So being a leader, isn't something you have to save to the last minute. And you can cultivate leadership even at the undergrad level at universities, Rice has a really good leadership program with the Dorr Institute and helping students at Rice become leaders through coaching.
And so if you do that assessment, then you can get a sense of like, okay, here's what I know that I know. And here's what I don't know. And there are specific recommendations based on what you enter in the system. It's, it's kind of a long assessment, but it's very thorough, I am very thorough person. And yeah, it has like specific, like these are, this is probable job titles.
This is approximately what you'll make. These are things that you can do to further your career at this point in time. And these are all the areas like comprehensively that you have now and where you're weak,
Evan: [00:16:51] And anyone can do that.
Angela: [00:16:52] Anyone can do that, and it's free. We don't charge for that because I think it's important to know like where you're at and be able to assess [00:17:00] that.
And honestly, I get that question so often. That it automates a problem for me. People want to know, like, what do I do next? Well, you can go and fill out this form and you can enter in your information and it will give you a prescriptive list of things that you can do next. Okay. It's not going to give you schools. It's not going to give you specific training classes. It will tell you the areas where you're strong and where you're weak.
Evan: [00:17:25] So we could definitely put that in the show notes, link out to that. And if people want to take that assessment and get a sense of their strengths and weaknesses to help them kind of inform what kind of next steps you want to take with your career, that could be really helpful.
So you think in your opinion, try to find some that's a little more diametrically opposite to where you may already be strong. So if you're someone who has a psych who's in that who's, who's maybe got some psych training or media degree. Maybe you should focus more on a program that kind of speaks more to design skill.
Or to try to compliment that if they're trying to go more design on a design track, is there a way, [00:18:00] is there a way that you want to kind of counterbalance what you may already have or what the experiences you already have?
Angela: [00:18:05] So, I think that the first thing that you need to do is you need to become kind of a journeyman level expert of. Say, if you think about there's the novice there's apprentice, there's a journeyman, there's the master.
If you're in applied cognitive psychology, you're a master in applied cognitive psychology, and you're probably an apprentice, a late stage apprentice in UX research. And so we want to build out and make sure you've done some UX research so your solidly, journeyman in that area. Um, because there is a, there is a difference.
And so my advice to people is always like, Develop one solid area of expertise, the journeyman level, where, you know, you can just do it almost without having to think about it and then go in and yeah, in other areas, UX is such an interdisciplinary area. You really have to have one thing that you're kind of good [00:19:00] at or an area of expertise, and then use that.
To build things on. So I think it's, it's called a T shape career path. Like you have one area where you have a tremendous amount of depth and then you want to go in and add on things. Okay. And then understanding what you're good at, like understanding where you want to work. They're going to be shorter pathways depending on what your background is.
My background, I was a subject matter expert. But I, and I worked with large data sets as a subject matter expert. And so that's how I ended up being a subject matter expert or a UX person that specializes in large data driven applications, mission critical stuff, because that's what I always did. And so, um, understanding like, What your strength is and what you like working on.
I find that those applied cognitive psychologists tend to do pretty well with also the large data-driven people. Cause there's applied cognitive psychology programs are really strong with the math and they're already used to working with large data sets, but other folks like it's really the difference between enterprise applications, business, to business and business, to consumer.
What space are you going to go into and understanding what you. What your aptitudes are there as well. Okay. You sent me in front of like business to consumer, a lot of business, consumer stuff, and I'm like, Oh, here's some data. This is really not enough complexity for
Evan: [00:20:36] me
Angela: [00:20:38] to give you
Evan: [00:20:39] advice.
Ayan: [00:20:42] So Angela, you're saying that UX is a very interdisciplinary field and I totally agree with you, but my question is. As we come from so many different educational backgrounds. For example, I come from industrial design background. Evan, you come from more of a programming background isn't really necessary for [00:21:00] someone to go and get UX training, or can we kind of just perhaps learn as we go by taking a mismatch of what we already have from our past education.
Angela: [00:21:10] I believe you need some sort of training. The one path, I think that may not need training as much training is the faults coming out of those associates of arts and visual design specifically. Like the one I have in mind is from the artist Institute. Like those folks come out with enough knowledge usually to get started and. Pretty seamlessly figure it out. And that's not a plug for the art Institute. That's just, in my observation, the associates are arts that they, you know, they have constraints that I don't want to give the impression that they don't.
But in terms of like a UX career, you know, starting out there or at a community college is a really great way to get some foundational skills. Otherwise, I think that you do need some supplemental education because most of our education system is not set up the way. That UX thinks about problems. You know, most of our education system is just push, push, push, push. They talked about differentiation, but there's really very little tolerance for individual differences and meeting students really where they are. They want to put out a thousand, 1500 of the same, roughly the same student. And so that's the education kids are getting from the time they enter the school system.
Right. And UX is is not at all about that. UX is about taking each student, evaluating where they are, maybe putting them in groups, similarities, and cognitive style or whatever else. And then meeting them where they are and trying to achieve a goal, which is a generalized, good education. And so.this mental model is so pervasive in the education industry that, you know, it's difficult for students too, that are coming out of it to think differently. It's also, if users don't understand something, there's still the belief from on a software development side and even on the user side, but that if they can't do something, it's because they're stupid. The user is stupid. Not because it's poorly programmed. And so, yeah, I think that in general, you need to go back to school to learn that different way of thinking and go back and learn how to observe people and how to have that humility about you know, saying that you don't understand something or doing something and watching it fail and being okay with that.
Cause right now, failure as in America is not a cultural attribute that we aspire to. Right. And so, uh, learning how to fail and fail successfully. These are all things that you're going to get in a UX program, right? Yeah. And that's the piece, that soft skills piece that you want to definitely supplement your education with.
Evan: [00:24:20] Yeah. You're going to get, you're going to get a slice. Like I, so I have, my background was computer science and got a slice of development and like it very much, but. I understand how software was made. I did a little, I made a little software, right? And so whatever your background is, whatever you had studied, you're going to have that slice, but it's, it is a kind of collection of multidisciplinary skills.
I see UX designers, they strive to do really well. You know, presentations, communication. A lot of emotional intelligences type of skills can become very useful, very quickly, depending on the maturity of the organization, you're working in. The coding element, certainly a part of it, the design and composing, understanding gestalt theory and kind of putting things together and also.
Uh, what was a tremendous gap for me was talking to other humans of how their experience, they never had any training and ethnographic research or qualitative research never came up while on earth would a computer scientist need to do that type of stuff. We talk to machines, you know, we focus on that algorithm and things.
So your going to have, you're going to have gaps and being aware of those gaps and, and focusing on them in many different ways, right? Like you said, like, Community college can be a very affordable option to kind of fill in some of those gaps. There's there's online training courses, and it's not about folks telling like, Hey, this is the best one, go do this one because you just simply too many, but being aware where your gaps are and looking at what fits your life, circumstance, your finances, because your time is like, if I want to commit and try to get there a little foundational education and some of these gap areas can be very useful.
Angela: [00:25:58] Like the number one activity I like people to do, or two activities is really exercises in listening and exercises in observing. And those are two different skills. And so listening students, they, anybody can do this, like cultivating a practice of just open mindedly listening because that's a foundational UX skill.
If you can't do that, then you're not going to be able to do design. You're not going to be able to do research. Do you know, cultivating that capacity to listen without judgment, to hear people to repeat back what has been heard, I think is hugely important. And then to be able to go in and observe. And so like, my students at Kent, of like one of their activities I have them do is I'm like, you need to go to a coffee shop and you want to spend an hour there or go to the mall or go somewhere else.
So very difficult. Right now, right? Thank gosh, it's not an assignment they have this semester. Go to the grocery store, how many people are wearing masks? How many people are not wearing masks? What are they wearing? Are they, you know, what is the general age? What is the mix of what men to women in the grocery store. Go to a second grocery store how is that different than the first? Like, and what you're trying not to do is, um, judge. You're just collecting data. That's the hardest part is we're we're taught to judge and what we need to do is keep an open mind about things and just there's the information, analyze the information and make recommendations rather than judging early on.
Evan: [00:27:34] That's a good point.
Angela: [00:27:36] And that's not taught in a computer science program. Like that observing that collecting feedback from users. I think that that should be like something they're taught as freshmen, that they should be one of your first classes is going out and conducting user research, not even design research!.
Evan: [00:27:54] I think I would've had a much different educational path. I would have, I probably would enjoy it a little more [00:28:00] if that was part of it. But, uh, yeah, I mean that, I think that's a good point. It was a, is that the jumping to conclusions and, and that kind of tendency and you're kind of, you're kind of deprogramming that a little bit.
You're trying to like diffuse that and be like, I just need, we just need to get some information. Let's lay it on the table and, and see what is happening because a lot of what you're trying to do in an organization is to kind of fuse people's personal opinions about certain things, or they've invested a lot in this product.
They're there, they're the founder, they're visionary. They love their idea. It's precious. They don't want it to be hurt. And you're just like, Hey, I'm not trying to say you're foolish or this is bad. I'm just trying to say there's some, there's some realities out there that we need to look, go gather, bring back in.
And just look at it as passionately and say, what do we, you know, what can we do about this? And that's really powerful.
Ayan: [00:28:50] Yeah. And I think those exercises can be so rich because it could also help us just to become observant of our environment in which we are members of. So, yeah, I think it's great exercises especially the earlier on the better.
Angela: [00:29:02] Absolutely like the earlier on and creating an inside of organization, it's creating a culture where that's acceptable, anything we can do to be mindful of our biases and, and, you know, accept what's happening around us as not neither good, nor bad, but just, it is what it is. Not only does that benefit us professionally, it benefits the companies, but it benefits us personally too
Ayan: [00:29:28] yeah, it's also going from that shift to being subjective, which we often are and learning how to become objective and distancing yourself, perhaps from your thoughts and just really observing everything in its entirety before you make your assumptions.
Evan: [00:29:41] Angela has got a lot more to share we're going to pick up the discussion and part two of UX education.
Take care, everyone. Thanks.
[00:30:15] Thanks for listening to the Ascend UX podcast. Uh, a show me by the user experience team at PROS a software company in Houston, Texas that develops AI powered solutions for businesses. Learn more at pros.com/ux that's P R O s.com forward slash UX. Our main theme music is by ultra vice. You can listen to more of his work at soundcloud.com/ultra vise.
[00:30:39] Also, thanks to Lakey inspired for his music as well. You can listen to more of his work at soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired and special thanks to our editor and producer, Brandon Robinson.
[00:30:50] Stay gritty friends.