Online students meet in person for practical experience in user design
Greg Walsh meets with students from all over the country when he starts his online classes, but sometimes the best way to teach user experience is to help students witness it happening in real life.
Walsh, the Parsons Professor of Digital Innovation and director of UBalt鈥檚 Certificate in Advanced UX Research, invited students in the M.S. in Interaction Design and Information Architecture program to campus for a live experiment.
It was an intense but memorable week when the students had volunteer participants, ranging in age and background, running through various tasks online. The students used special programming to review and analyze in real time how each participants鈥� eyes scanned each webpage.
鈥淲ith this type of project, we're looking at if you remove like all the corporate cloth what, truthfully, would help people have the best online experience?鈥� explained McKennley Wilson, one of the IDIA students.
For Vivian Ng, an IDIA student from Chicago, it was an exciting opportunity, especially coming from a computer science undergraduate program that didn鈥檛 leave much room for the interactivity she craved.
鈥淚 love the fact that we're working with people,鈥� she said, 鈥渁nd you get to interact with others and communicate your ideas to others, versus just sitting in front of a screen and not being able to talk to people or physically touch things and do things and just get creative.鈥�
The project gave Wilson, an online student from Mississippi, his first visit to UBalt campus.
鈥淚鈥檓 super happy to be here,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 been a great experience to come in person, experience the labs, be able to do research and interact with my classmates. It鈥檚 super cool.鈥�
Wilson said he鈥檚 felt a strong connection with his peers even in the online classes, so the in-person experiment just elevated everything, from class lessons to collaborations.
鈥淲e're not just strangers/classmates that we only see online every Monday, but it feels like we have a lot of camaraderie, like we are like a research team working together, and it's been a really fun experience.鈥�