[ATTW-L] Introducing UX Research to Undergrads

[Lindsay Steiner]

I second the other suggestions (especially texts from A Book Apart). You might also try Steve Portigal’s Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights (Rosenfeld, 2013) and Krug’s Rocket Surgery Made Easy (New Riders, 2010). I know you also mention Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, which I’ve used for classes where the students don’t have any experience in usability and I want to provide a broad overview of related principles. They have responded well to that book.

Lindsay

From: ATTW-L <attw-l-bounces at attw.org> on behalf of "Hendrickson, Brian" <bhendrickson at rwu.edu>
Date: Friday, October 12, 2018 at 8:36 AM
To: "attw-l at attw.org" <attw-l at attw.org>
Subject: [ATTW-L] Introducing UX Research to Undergrads

Dear List,

I'm curious to know what resources you use to teach undergrads (esp. non-majors) to conduct web usability research, or UX research in general.

I've mostly found texts that discuss general usability principles, such as handbooks for general audiences (e.g. Krug 2014) or introductory TC textbooks, but that don't go into much depth on methods. Barnum's (2002) Usability Testing and Research seems to be the most thorough instructional text on methodology we have in TC, but 16 years is a long time ago. I may be running up against what Chong (2016) identifies as a lack of explicitly pedagogical texts in TC concerning usability.

I'd love to hear from you if you have used these or other texts, and to what degree of success.

Some context: This spring, as part of an intermediate level special topics course I'm calling Community-based Writing in a Digital World, I'm taking on a community engagement project that involves developing web content/architecture for a police department's community relations bureau, which will further involve conducting UX research with community and police stakeholders to ensure that the web space facilitates partnership and trust building. Because it satisfies a gen ed requirement, I am likely to get students of all majors and at various levels of degree completion, which is why I'm pushing for very "usable" texts.

Thanks,

Brian Hendrickson, PhD
Assistant Professor
Dept of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition
Roger Williams University
bhendrickson at rwu.edu<mailto:bhendrickson at rwu.edu>
Pronouns: he/him/his
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