A world without UX Design...

To make people realize how important something is, we must rob it from them.

In this spirit, my teammate Chenyu and I have built this spot-the-UX-fails activity for a class of 19 grad students brand-new to the world of UX.

Here’s the mock webpage (“The Form.html”)….

And here’s the final list of all UX fails we built.

Learning objectives

• Describe the value of good user experience
• Recognize and apply the Fundamental Principles of Interaction in the form of a design critique

Context: Every week, a different pair of UX Design students become the Topic Leaders (TL) and co-lead an original short activity for the class. We led the first TL week — an intro to UX— and our readings included classics such as Chapter One of The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, several of Don’s videos on the Nielson Norman Group channel, and chapters about the product team from Inspired by Marty Cagan.

Instructions

Some activity design highlights:

• Custom built webpage with UX fails aligned to our reading
• The activity is grounded in a (somewhat plausibly) authentic backstory for immersion for a class of beginner UX learners
• The “deliverable” of the activity, as a Slack message, is authentic. Based on what we read about roles in a product team, UX designers constantly need to collaborate with other functions and/or justify the value of UX

Roles

Chenyu and I ideated the bad UX designs; Chenyu prototyped them and I built it using HTML/CSS/JS.