Full list of course offerings

Experience Design Career Visioning and Strategy

UX 974

Your Experience Design Career Strategy

The Bentley Experience Design (XD) Certificate program is designed to help you transition from your current career to one in experience design or to enhance your skills if you are already in the field. To set you up for success, this course will help you define your goals for completing the XD Certificate and the steps you will need to take to get there.

In this course, we will look at the common career journeys within the experience design field. We will define the roles, responsibilities, and skills required for a successful career as a user researcher, designer, and leader, and we'll discuss considerations for working in companies of various sizes and industries. We will explore career ladders, the latest salary and market data, and what hiring managers look for from applicants. To bring this to life, we will have a variety of guest speakers from the field share their career journeys and the skills they needed to master to be successful.

Next, we will define what vision, mission, and strategy are, and how to apply them to your career plan. We will discuss how to build your professional brand, curate your LinkedIn profile, and create a portfolio, including what needs to be in one and how you can build yours out as you take the XD Certificate courses. We will also look at pros and cons of various resume formats to ensure that you are as marketable as possible and discuss networking approaches.

Finally, you will apply what you have learned to create your own experience design career strategy, which will clearly articulate how to get from here to where you want to go.

Key Takeaways:

• Define and articulate your development and career goals for completing the certificate program
• Understand the key skills required for experience design roles
• Learn what experience design professionals do at every level
• Learn how to find and assess market and salary data for experience design jobs
• Identify which courses in the certificate program will support your goals
• Learn what hiring managers are looking for in XD resumes and portfolios
• Create a plan for how to build your professional brand, LinkedIn profile, portfolio, and resume as you complete the program
• Gain hands-on practice creating your career strategy

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Human Factors & Experience Design

UX900C

Course Description

Designing usable products and an effective user experience requires an understanding of the human behaviors underlying the user's interaction with the product or service. Human Factors in Information Design introduces you to the applied theories relevant to the design of information products, systems, user interface designs and the larger user experience. This course is particularly relevant to those working with critical applications, diverse user populations, and new technologies. Foundations in Human Factors helps you design applications compatible with the user's goals and the strengths and weaknesses of the user's perceptual and cognitive processing systems. This course helps you to anticipate user requirements before product development, to explain the user's performance during usability and prototype testing, and to foster a smooth transition for users facing new technologies or information.

Key Outcomes

• Gain a comprehensive understanding of human behavior and its application to enhancing experience design.
• Weight a given behavior in the context of the user population(s), product requirements, and use environment.
• Employ these practices in the design process to proactively enhance the user experience as well as to evaluate problematic areas in existing product designs.
• Communicate the importance of this approach to the product design team and product owner
• Consider and apply an understanding of human perception (sight, sound, touch, and gesture) to a user’s interaction with a product or service.
• Apply principles of perceptual organization and design patterns to assist the user in rapidly organizing and navigating the designed space.
• Appreciate and apply the foundational principles of cognitive psychology to create products that are intuitive, easy to learn, safe and productive.
• Design to support demanding cognitive activities in the user experience such as reading, learning, decision making and the like. Consider and design to support the emotional aspects of the user experience such as social connection, anxiety, motivation, pleasure, and gamification.
• Apply these same principles to emerging technologies such as the IOT, conversational interfaces, cognitive computing, virtual reality and the like.

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The Business of Experience Design

UX930C

Course Description

Leading User Experience distills decades of best practices, principles, and real-world experience into a highly interactive two-day course applicable to design organizations ranging in size from a single designer in a startup to hundreds of designers in Fortune 500 organizations.

Key Outcomes

• Clearly define User Experience
• Understand the 100+ year history leading to the explosion of the modern UX profession
• Appreciate how waterfall, agile, and unintentional bias have shaped and constrained the environment designers work in today
• Compare and contrast the Lean Movement, Design Thinking, and the Double Diamond
• Connect this knowledge through the lens of Lean UX

Design Challenge

Students will use the Lean UX canvas to translate these concepts into real world projects.

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The Experience Design Process

UX 980

Course Description

How does a designer take an idea, problem statement, or user need and create a useful and usable product or service out of it? This course offers an in-depth exploration of the experience design process, equipping students with an understanding of the strategies, methods, skills, and tools needed to craft engaging and impactful experiences that deliver real value within the constraints of typical fast-paced product development organizations. Students will learn how to apply human-centered design, stakeholder management, storytelling, and systems thinking to address complex challenges and create solutions that resonate with users for zero-to-one, scale-up, and enterprise products. Through a mix of theoretical insights, real-world examples, nuanced discussions, and practical exercises, students will gain an understanding of the work required to traverse all the phases of the experience design process.

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Inclusive, Ethical, and World-Ready Experiences

UX 978

In today’s diverse and interconnected world, designing user experiences that are inclusive, ethical, and globally aware is not just a value-add but a necessity. This intensive 14-hour course, spread over two days, delves into the principles and practices required to create digital experiences that resonate universally while respecting cultural, ethical, and accessibility standards.

Participants will explore the following key areas:

• Inclusivity in UX Design: Learn to design products that cater to diverse user groups, including those with disabilities, varying cultural backgrounds, and different socio-economic statuses. Understand the importance of empathy in design and how to incorporate accessibility features seamlessly. Participants will gain insights into the range of disabilities and key accessibility principles, learning how to integrate accessibility into the UX design process to create universally usable and engaging web experiences.
• Ethical Considerations: Gain insights into ethical UX design practices, including user data privacy, consent, and the impact of design choices on user behavior. Discuss case studies of ethical dilemmas in UX and explore frameworks for making responsible design decisions. This segment explores the values that shape the design process and their impact on user experience, societal interactions, and ecological sustainability. Participants will examine how design values influence product features and user interactions, and how incorporating knowledge of human nature into design can affect broader societal changes.
• Global Readiness: Understand the challenges and strategies for designing experiences that are effective across different cultures and regions. Learn about localization, internationalization, and cultural sensitivity in UX design. Participants will learn strategies for tailoring technology products to meet the needs of the international community. The course covers internationalization of user experience aspects including support, translation, interaction design, interface design, user research, and testing. Emphasis is placed on understanding cultural psychology and cultural anthropology to address ethnocentric biases and propose a globalized core design adaptable for local markets.

Through interactive lectures, group discussions, and hands-on workshops, participants will develop the skills needed to create user experiences that are not only functional and aesthetically pleasing but also inclusive, ethical, and globally relevant.

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Experience Research and Data Strategy

UXC 988

Research and data analysis is central to experience design. These processes help teams to understand what should be created, what the impact of an experience has been, and whether any changes or modifications need to be made to existing experience. Despite the importance of research and data analysis, many organizations lack mature research processes. Additionally, organizations are data rich without knowing it due to a lack of awareness regarding what constitutes data and how to examine and analyze it effectively.

This course will help attendees develop a comprehensive experience research and data strategy. As a result, companies will have a refined approach to understanding audience needs, creating better solutions and designs, and confidently evaluating experiences to improve outcomes. 

Key Outcomes:

• Identify what makes something ‘data’
• Understand perspectives on capturing and analyzing experiences
• Explore perspectives and assumptions in research and data collection
• Compare how framing and points of view can influence data analysis
• Conduct an evaluation of organizational research and data analysis approaches
• Create a comprehensive experience research and data analysis strategy

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Qualitative Research Methods

UX929C

Course Description

User Research Methods complement lab and online studies and are an essential part of a user researcher’s toolkit. This course covers several types of user research methods, including both qualitative and quantitative techniques. We will start with an overview of UX research and a discussion about how user research methods fit in. Then, through lectures, case studies, class exercises, and group discussions, we will explore commercial ethnography (including home and office visits), interviewing, diary studies, survey design, focus groups, and the development of personas. In the classroom, we’ll practice ethnographic interviewing and the cognitive pretesting of a questionnaire. We’ll also spend one morning outside of the classroom on a project involving participant observation (web students will be able to participate in their community). With some additional work, this project could be used in a portfolio as an example of user experience research. Students will leave with a long list of recommended books, articles, websites, and videos.  

Key Outcomes

• Conduct an ethnographic interview in class after learning about interviewing techniques (both semi-structured and ethnographic interviewing).
• Learn how to create an observation guide for a home or ethnographic study.
• Engage in participant observation (outside of the classroom) as part of a field study during the second day of class, after learning about the methods of commercial ethnography and contextual design.
• Understand the ethics of doing field research and the principles of professional responsibility of the American Anthropological Association and the American Sociological Association.
• Gain confidence to try new techniques and understand that in most cases there is no one “right” way to collect user experience information or to understand consumer behavior.
• Learn the basics of survey design and all the serious errors that must be avoided.
• Learn how to perform cognitive pretesting of questionnaires and to analyze an error-filled questionnaire in the classroom.
• Learn how to conduct a diary study and choose among the three types of reporting, the multiple techniques for collecting data, and typical types of analysis.
• Learn the basics of personas and focus groups.
• Understand where to find online sources of UX information and how to continue learning most effectively.

Research Challenge

There are two options for the research challenge, which should be completed in the month following the class. The first is to continue the study of coffee shop culture and behavior started during class, visiting and observing at several Starbucks to try to characterize customer behavior and social interaction, and learn how the layout and design of the physical space influence customer behavior. Students will turn in their observation guide, notes, and a report that examines how Starbucks’ user experience can be improved.  Alternatively, a student can work with the instructor to set up a project that involves the methods discussed in the course, with the goal of improving a product or service

This course is taught by Demetrios Karis. View his bio here.

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Usability Research

UX922C

Course Description

The usability study is the keystone research method in user experience research. Whether we are evaluating a digital product, a physical device, or even a real-world experience, observing people’s behaviors while they interact with something is the gold standard of research. This course will take you through the usability study timeline and convey best practices for each step along the way to ensure your research attains goals and has actionable outcomes. We’ll discuss preparing for the study, conducting it, how to analyze the data, and how to best convey the results to others. With interactive group exercises and an assignment to conduct a small-scale study, this course will give you the needed practical tools to conduct your own successful usability research.

Key Outcomes

• Define and measure usability
• Distinguish between the different types of usability studies
• Establish user research goals for your usability study
• Create a screening questionnaire to recruit study participants who match your target user profile
• Develop a scenario and tasks for your study
• Create a data collection plan and best practices for data collection
• Prepare the materials required to prepare, conduct, and analyze a usability study
• Effectively moderate a usability study session
• Analyze and report on your usability study findings

Research Challenge

The final assignment is a small-scale usability study with complete documentation. Students will create a participant screener and study interview guide, recruit three friends as participants, conduct the sessions via Zoom, create a report, and submit a moderation self-critique.

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Experience Design Fundamentals

UX935C

Course Description

This course will explore the propagation of user requirements into design solutions. Students will investigate the design space through multiple perspectives to identify opportunities for innovation. The class will examine design stages and techniques through real-world examples and hands-on prototype development. Student teams will generate scenarios and storyboards providing a foundation to synthesize features into logical areas comprising an information architecture and interaction design. User experience concepts will be visualized in the form of paper prototypes as teams explore the relationship between content types, navigational metaphors, and creating a branded experience. Teams will share, critique, and defend their progress.

Key Outcomes

• Five elements of the user experience: strategy, scope, structure, skeleton, surface 
• Design Thinking principles and examples
• Design planning integrated with generative and evaluative research 
• Translation of research insights into design principles 
• The role of metaphor and analogy in design 
• Developing a vision statement and high-level scope for the UX
• Conceptual modeling and descriptive/prospective frameworks 
• Creating context scenarios 
• UX design within agile development 
• Designing for physical + digital experiences 
• Developing skeletal designs with key views and screenflows
• Storyboards: illustrating key path scenarios 
• Paper prototyping 

Design Challenge

Students will create storyboards and screens (app + website) for a virtual lost-and-found: how a ‘finder’ might tag and post a discovered item; how a ‘loser’ might search, identify, authenticate, and retrieve said item. 

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Prototyping the User Experience

UX915C

Course Description

Key Outcomes

• Learn about different types of prototyping at different stages of the Design Thinking process
• Learn and practice prototyping using paper, Balsamiq, and Figma 
• Learn and practice design critique techniques
• Create a portfolio sample with a course prototyping project

Design Challenge

Students can choose one of the three provided design challenges and create design solutions for targeted users by applying the design thinking process and prototyping techniques covered in the course. The students can work on the assignment for 2-3 weeks and the final deliverables include (1)wireframes for the solution, (2) higher visual and interaction fidelity prototypes, (3) a slides deck describing the project with a recorded presentation, and (4) 1-page portfolio write-up. 

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Content Strategy

UX964C

Introduction

Any digital experience is about creating a conversation with users. Conversations consist of words, tone, even gestures. How can you create a conversation with users without looking at the content of that conversation first? Of course, there are many elements, such as research, analysis, and writing, that go into creating a streamlined, thoughtful conversation. In this course, I’ll walk you through the steps for putting content strategy first in everything you design.

Course Description

Putting content first means implementing a multi-phase design process. Rather than creating a design and filling in the content after the fact, I’ll introduce a way to use a content-based creative approach that will lead you to a human-centered design in the form of wireframes and visuals. We’ll look at the following and more in the content design process:

• Content inventories and audits
• Prevision work including conversation maps and content maps
• A prototype based on your findings
• Testing and iterating on your work
• Creating final designs

Who Should Attend?

Anyone interested in user experience or content strategy, content design, or UX writing, as well as the content curious.

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