Enhancing Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience Education through a Hybrid Approach to Experiential Learning

This paper introduces the concept and implementation of a hybrid experiential learning approach to building a User Experience (UX) Lab at a large public university (the University of Central Florida). The UX Lab @ UCF (UX Lab) is intended to bridge the gap between traditional project-based courses and full-time industry internships to provide Information Technology (IT) undergraduates (and students from other disciplines and levels) with the opportunity to apply their Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) knowledge and hone their UX skills by working in partnership with local companies. Specifically, students work as part-time, paid UX consultants for local companies while receiving guidance, mentoring, and feedback from a faculty mentor and graduate student with expertise in HCI and UX. Thus, the UX Lab contributes to IT pedagogy by providing students with a unique opportunity to apply what they've learned in their HCI coursework to real products in development by actual companies. Our approach complements other pedagogical approaches, such as industry-sponsored project-based courses and capstone courses. In this paper, we describe the conceptual model upon which the UX Lab was built, and the success of the first proof-of-concept project that was recently completed in May 2017.