Philosophy
Teaching in a New Age
In the old days of web design, designers worked in design tools like Photoshop and Illustrator; familiarized themselves with color theory, layout, and typography; and read books by Jakob Nielson and Don Norman. At the same time, they had a key understanding of how to translate their craft into the digital space, helping to bridge the gap between design and development.
Today, the design field is not so simple: user researchers conduct research; user experience designers translate that research into journey maps, sketches and wireframes; visual designers convert low-fidelity mockups into high-fidelity interactive prototypes; and front-end developers translate those interactive prototypes into working code. By focusing only on one part of the process, designers and developers often lose sight of the big picture, essentially "dropping the ball over the wall" to the next person without a true understanding of what problem they're trying to solve and what is required to turn fiction into reality.
A big part of this mindset comes from a lack of professional education. The majority of UX designers are self-taught, with little experience in visual design or front-end development. As I can personally attest, learning on your own—especially in a restrictive corporate environment—can only take you so far.
As an educator, my goal isn't just for my students to learn a skill or new technique: it's to help them gain and ultimately apply and share their knowledge. In order to truly understand, designers need to engage with actual users and shadow industry experts, and more importantly, have real world opportunities to do the work themselves. For example, when designing for accessibility, what if training focused on the human cost and benefit of such measures? Rather than simply focusing on accessibility guidelines and design and coding techniques, what if students began by acting like a blind person for a day and resorting to having websites read to them?
Life is not a textbook or a list of do's and don'ts. Rather, life is full of twists and turns, defined in essence by experiences. While good experiences can inspire one to learn and grow, poor experiences can demoralize and discourage. Most importantly, sharing the why behind the what can open minds and doors to where almost anything is possible.
As an educator, this requires a different mindset. It requires challenging students to think outside of their perspective and to mentally—and sometimes physically—walk in someone else’s shoes. By doing so they can become passionate learners, willing to build bridges everywhere they go. For in the end, true change only happens one step at a time, but together we have the power to reimagine what is possible.
Using Research to Solve Problems
In 2008, I was working as a web designer at Magellan Health, a healthcare company that specialized in behavioral health. Magellan had recently been awarded a contract with the Illinois Department of Veteran’s Affairs to provide assistance to veterans struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injuries (TBI), and I spent several weeks working with internal staff and the VA to design and build a website as part of the program. As a veteran myself, I have unique knowledge of the struggles veterans face, and it quickly became apparent that the people I was working with did not have this same perspective. While they wanted to trumpet “Get help” all over the website, I had to remind them that military members by nature aren’t the help-seeking type. So instead, we spent some time talking to veterans, and ultimately we focused our efforts on supporting family members and highlighting stories from other veterans who had struggled and overcame.
From that point onward, research became the foundation of every design project. As a designer, I always stepped back to start at the beginning: who are you designing for, and what problem are you trying to solve? One of my last projects at Magellan revolved around creating a member portal for Medicaid members with a severe mental illness. However, after research showed that a sizable percentage of these members are homeless and 40 percent of them don’t have phones, I pivoted the project to focus on the people taking care of the members. While this pivot worked well within the realm of user experience, I felt it was inadequate, and I found myself wondering what we could do instead. Most solutions are formulated from a therapy standpoint, but what if we evaluated solutions beginning from the actual person’s perspective?
We hear about these types of problems every day, but the idea of using design to solve complex problems—also called “wicked problems”—is an unexplored frontier. Helping people quit addiction or keeping a person with schizophrenia on track and off the street is a unique situation that requires a different approach.
In my research practice at Miami University, I concentrated my work on designing for wicked problems, such as incorporating mental health services at infertility clinics, providing families with appropriate post-treatment care after their child leaves the hospital, or providing viable alternatives to traditional in-person pediatric physical therapy via telemedicine. By using research to gain a different perspective, my hope as a designer is to find unique solutions to difficult problems, and while we can’t solve for everything, perhaps we can design for one step at a time.