Establishing Academic-Industry Partnerships

Abstract

Emphasizing a transdisciplinary research model for distributed usability testing, this article offers a case study for establishing successful academic-industry partnerships. The authors describe the collaboration process between the co-investigators in this partnership: the UX researchers, the user participants, and the stakeholders at the industry company. The authors explain how they used the transdisciplinary research model to write a winning proposal for collaboration and then highlight how the benefits of a transdisciplinary research model were realized in practice. The implications of the authors' findings support developing UX curriculum and pedagogy in ways that emphasize real-world application tied to transdisciplinary research teams and formal, distributed usability testing.