Effects of Design Thinking on Learning User Experience and User Interface Design

Abstract

User experience design is more essential and important for the planning then visual interface design. In this research, design thinking integrated in “User-Interface Design for Mobile Device” course for making the students to investigate the user requirements from the related tools. Both the group of design and the group of technology students will have interdisciplinary groups and do the research about the user requirements according to spectacular topics from related workshops in the class. Later on, they will learn how to do the interface design prototype with related software and also concern about the visual style. It will help the students understand the point of how to execute project and practice it. Also, the experts are invited to the class for giving talks and suggestion about the students’ projects and sharing the ideas of design innovation and experiences. User test is required after the students finish their design project, beside set up several tasks with scenarios for the participants to see what kind problems they would have during the investigation of the prototype of the service app. The students can learn and practice four phases of design thinking. There are several evaluating methods of teaching and learning in this research: descriptive statics, reliability analysis, and independent sample t-test. The students gave positive feedback for the general questionnaires, and the reliability is high for the value of Cronbach’ alpha. For the arrangement and teaching method in this course, expert critics are helpful for implementation of related design projects, and the students can get more advices from this teaching method. In the future study, more experts from the industry will be invited for different advices and feedbacks according to the types from students’ projects for practical and integral learning experiences.