Education & training as experience strategy

Appreciation for the experience design profession is rapidly increasing, as more and more organizations are elevating and often differentiating their products and services via the user/customer experience. Now, more than ever, the world needs professionals who understand experience design and can execute on it.

Susan and I have been teaching experience design and related topics for years. Susan used to teach undergrad and graduate user experience courses at San Francisco State University, Latrobe University, and the University of New South Wales. I taught user-centered design courses via the University of California Berkeley Extension and user experience management courses via the University of California Santa Cruz Extension. We’ve both taught experience design and management workshops at a variety of conferences and companies, and we’ve both written numerous articles and made presentations at numerous professional events. I was Co-Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine for 3 years.

We continue to make contributions of a related nature. For example, we both teach graduate level user experience courses for the Academy of Art University, and we both teach experience design courses — one of them a 10-week, 5 days/week, 8 hours/day immersive — for General Assembly.  I’m also likely to co-teach another user experience management course later this year.

Healthcare projects are one of OE Strategy’s priorities (e.g., Susan is involved in two projects seeking to improve access to healthcare in developing countries), and many of my recent writings and presentations have been about how designers can maximize their impact on healthcare design projects. Here is a partial list:

• Utilizing patients in the experience design process - interactions magazine blog (Nov ’13)
• Learning from ePatient( scholar)s - interactions magazine blog (Sept ’13)
• Are you trying to solve the right problem? - interactions magazine blog (May ’13)
• Preventing nightmare patient experiences like mine (subtitle: Avoiding ‘putting lipstick on a pig’) - Healthcare Experience Design 2013 (Apr in Boston)
• The importance of the social to achieving the personal - interactions magazine blog (Dec ’12)
• A call to action regarding the patient experience - Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC) 2012 (Oct in Savannah)
• A call to action regarding healthcare - UX Magazine (Apr ’12)
• In need of transformation: the patient experience - Creative Mornings San Francisco (Apr ’12)

My most recent presentation took place just last month during a meeting of the Stanford School of Medicine Design for Health course (ANES 206). The topic for the evening was design with empathy, and I shared the instructor podium with IDEO’s Annie Valdez.

Susan and I will continue to teach about experience design, and I encourage you and your organization to take advantage of the increasing number of opportunities to learn more about it. Doing so would be a part of an optimal experience strategy for any individual or company.

Richard