The unexpected pedagogies of working in UX

What does teaching look like in UX?

Though I started on the learning side of UX pedagogy when I first joined the company, my position as a UX researcher and designer in a relatively new design department meant that I quickly found myself encountering a variety of teaching opportunities. These opportunities now make up a core part of my role and vary widely in their formality, degree of explicitness, and audience.

Teaching opportunities and teachable moments

Given the importance of skills training and knowledge acquisition in today’s workplace, instances of more explicit or formalized teaching and learning are fairly common in a UX position. Depending on the type, size, and managerial style of the organization, these teaching and learning moments could include workshops; talks or presentations in a variety of contexts or audiences, such as a team meeting or a company townhall; and brownbag lunches or employee special interest groups. Additionally, many companies host conferences, symposia, or other events, not just for their own employees but also for their customers and users, at which employees typically present new work or lead workshops. In my three years working in UX, I have participated in many of these teaching opportunities, such as developing a conference workshop aimed at helping programmers incorporate basic design research activities into their projects (see also Ikeya et al 2007). Beyond the walls of the company, things like webinars and presentations or workshops at professional conferences are also increasingly common for UX practitioners. The close proximity of many UX job hubs to colleges and universities presents opportunities for guest lectures or part-time teaching in traditional academic environments. Regardless of the size or format, spaces dedicated to more structured teaching and learning are consistent parts of UX work.

Alongside the occasional workshop and other dedicated teaching spaces, more informal teaching and learning happens on a near-daily basis. As UX work can cut across a number of business functions, domains of expertise, and organizational processes, you often have to share or pick up parts of the specialized knowledge of others working on a project, as they can have an impact on your research or design activities. For example, in the course of a day, I might quickly review work in a daily project status meeting, help a team member learn a new technique, visit a coworkers desk to answer questions or iterate on something, offer constructive critiques of colleagues’ designs during a team meeting, or run into someone in the hallway and need to clarify something. Beyond one’s own organization, many industry professional communities have sprouted up on various social media platforms, such as Slack workspaces or LinkedIn groups, to facilitate research and design professionals engaging with one another about their work.

Teaching can also occur in an even less explicit fashion when certain concepts, rationales, or decisions become embedded in the outputs of UX work, especially when you know that others will be looking at something you’ve produced without you being present. In such instances, I pay particular attention to how I can embed my reasoning and considerations into whatever deliverable I’m creating, such as through the creative use of annotations or layers on a design. Similarly, while creating a repository for the original research that our teams do, my colleagues and I work to include instructional features into the design of the repository itself in order to foster the responsible interpretation and re-use of study methodologies and findings. In all these less formal or explicit instances, teaching often occurs in service to another activity or goal rather than being the point of the interaction itself, and sometimes occurs without the teacher being physically present.

Lastly, as a relatively new UX practitioner, the variation in audience dynamics is also something that has surprised me about teaching in industry. While most teaching occurs horizontally among colleagues who might occupy roughly the same standing in an organization, researchers or designers often have to “teach up” to managers, heads, directors, and executives. This is especially the case for those working in consulting, who are often brought in by executives so they can solve a particularly difficult challenge in an organization. While the interpersonal dynamics might vary depending on the teaching context (e.g. whether it’s a collaborative workshop or an important presentation), with this kind of audience, the stakes are often higher, as executive staff can shift the direction, resources, or priorities of work across various levels of an organization. Because of this, teaching up is a crucial part of gaining support for expanding the scope and scale of research or design work in an organization.

Blurred boundaries between teaching, learning, and doing

In contrast to academia where lectures, tests, and homework demarcate distinct spaces and forms of pedagogical labor, I quickly discovered that such boundaries were much more blurred in the teaching opportunities afforded by working in a corporation. While UX roles often entail teaching about the concepts or practicalities of UX, job specialization in contemporary workplaces make it important to learn the same nuances of your coworkers’ domains of work and knowledge. Sitting next to user interface (UI) designers, graphic and motion designers, programmers, business analysts, web writers, project managers, and people in a number of other roles has impressed upon me the “simultaneity of work, learning, and teaching” and how “work confidence and competency are constructed in situated activities” as professionals with distinct knowledge and organizational roles engage with one another (Beck 2005:1).

When I was teaching introductory courses to students who were mostly not anthropology majors, I sometimes wondered about the extent to which they would apply course content once they had left the classroom. However, when teaching and learning with my coworkers who come from all kinds of backgrounds, there is often a different level of interest and immediacy in using the knowledge we share. For example, through consecutive projects I have helped coworkers gradually learn to craft better research questions and become more comfortable with a methodology, and I have also learned to lead a project team and how to design and build an interface that meets accessibility standards. Through these experiences, I realized I didn’t just like teaching anthropology per se, but rather, I liked teaching concepts and methodologies that enable people to approach their activities or surroundings differently. Though undoubtedly possessing their own limitations, I’ve nonetheless come to view the pedagogical opportunities that arise in the business world as offering unique opportunities to teach and learn in context, which help those involved become more intentional, effective, and ethical actors in the world. It turns out I never stopped teaching when I decided to pursue a career in UX — the teaching just took on different forms.