Education & UX: an intersection
How my background in tutoring informs my approach to human-centered design.
“I still don’t get it.”
This is a phrase I’ve heard countless times from my tutoring students. From pinpointing the main themes of Jane Eyre to crafting an effective topic sentence, I’ve continuously found myself in the position of an academic troubleshooter. And even though it feels like I’ve talked about these same topics countless times, I find that I always have to adjust my explanation and delivery to meet each student’s unique learning profile.
Asking the right questions
I’ve learned to ask myself a series of foundational questions for each student I encounter:
- Are they a visual learner or a verbal learner?
- Do they learn top-down or bottom-up?
- Do they learn best with a single delivery method or do they learn multi-modally?
- Do they have issues with attention or anxiety that I should be mindful of?
Answering these questions is a process, and it may take me weeks or months to find the correct responses. Some students are less willing to engage and open up while others can’t wait to make a connection. Metacognition also comes into play — some students know exactly how they learn and the areas in which they struggle while others have no clue.
When I finally am able to find some answers, it’s amazing to see how tweaking my teaching and delivery methods can make such a huge difference in my students’ understanding and willingness to engage in the learning process.
Making connections
Asking these questions has also given me insight into who I am as a learner and what my instinctual approaches are when it comes to teaching. I’ve discovered that I usually take a top-down approach — I’m highly organized and like to map everything out before I embark on complex projects. I want to know what I’m doing before I sit down and spend time doing it. I also tend to teach verbally — as a writer, my gut is to script things out and then go back and forth to discuss concepts out loud. I’m able to keep track of big ideas by writing them down in note form and referring back to them when building out complex projects.
Since many of my students’ profiles don’t align with my own, I’ve challenged myself to step out of my normal modes. I never thought that I would be graphing out the plot of The Odyssey or making quick sketches as visual cues for vocab words, but creative methods like these have worked their way into my repertoire.
As a result, I’m a much more flexible educator. It’s never about me and how I learn; rather, I am always hungry to uncover how my students can best be served. And it’s all the more exciting when it’s a discovery that we can both make together!
Understanding how you learn is so valuable. Whether you’re a student or in the workforce, knowing these seemingly simple, foundational things about yourself can truly revolutionize your workflow. Once you put a name to your style, it can also help you better communicate with those around you and set up reasonable expectations.
The many applications of needfinding
When I take a step back, I realize that a huge part of tutoring is needfinding. What do my students need to learn to the best of their ability? How can I take what I know about their needs and apply it to my process? Engaging in this type of thinking requires much more than an understanding of the academic material on my part. I have to rely on many soft skills, such as communication, empathy, intuition, and, above all, the ability to be emotionally present and engaged. In a sense, I am constantly engaging in empathy research. My students are my subjects, and I am the ever-eager observer, trying to suss out how they tick.
As a UX/UI Designer, I draw on so many of these skills in my design work. At the core of human-centered design is a relentless drive to understand the user and meet their needs. Rather than just looking at a set of data points, being a great designer means being able to feel into the user’s experience. It means truly tapping into empathy skills to get into the user’s head and try to figure out their motivations and behavioral considerations, whether they’re conscious of them or not. It means being one step ahead, anticipating next moves and all the ways the user could go astray. Much like my students, many of my interviewees don’t fully understand why they do what they do, and it’s my job to figure that out.
When I sit down with my research participants, the experience is similar to being in a tutoring session. I feel out the emotional tenor of the situation and establish a connection. I ask questions to make them comfortable and learn about their experience. I notice things like body language and voice inflection, which help me understand more about how they might be feeling or how a particular question strikes them. Again, I am an observer, always attempting to get to the bottom of the needs of the person across from me.
Of course, this needfinding focus is extremely important during the research phase. Conducting empathy research effectively can make or break a design — if you don’t understand how your demographic operates, there’s no way you can meet their needs. The user should also remain present in subsequent definition and ideation phases. Once you move into the high-fidelity UI phase, it’s easy to let the user slip away and instead get sucked into creating earth-shattering, pixel-perfect elements. However, forgetting about the user at any stage of the design process will ultimately get in the way of the product’s success.
My path to UX Design hasn’t been a traditional one. I leveled up quickly, especially when it came to UI Design, through an intensive boot camp. However, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover how I’ve been able to transfer my empathy and communication skills to my new pursuit. Being an educator has only made me a stronger designer and has helped me understand the true meaning of contemporary human-centered design.
Do you have an empathy-driven skill set that might make you a great designer?
