Designing for Users, Not for Grades

This post is about teaching students to think about users before they write a single line of code.

The Blind Spot

Computer science students love to code. Give them a problem, they will start building immediately. That energy is great. But it hides a blind spot: they rarely stop to ask who they are building for.

The result is software that technically works but nobody wants to use. Features nobody asked for. Interfaces that make sense only to the developer. This is not a coding problem. It is a thinking problem.

The Canvas

I introduced my students to the User-Centered Design Canvas (UCDC). It is a one-page framework, inspired by the Business Model Canvas, that forces you to fill in nine fields before you build anything: business, users, problems, motives, fears, solutions, alternatives, competitive advantage, and unique value proposition.

The two fields that always surprise students are "motives" and "fears." Why would a user want this? And what would stop them from using it? These questions have nothing to do with code, but everything to do with whether the software will ever be used.

Timing: A Pandemic

This research happened in early 2020, right as Covid-19 forced everything online. Students could not collaborate in person. So we used cloud applications (Google Sheets) for the collaborative canvas work, then submitted final versions to our supportive tool.

It turned out that the canvas approach worked well remotely. Collaboration on a shared canvas is actually easier online than passing around paper. The pandemic forced a new culture of creative process, and the canvas fit right into it.

The Numbers

We surveyed 168 students, from first-year to fourth-year. Before the experiment, only 6% had ever heard of UCDC and only 12% had ever designed UX at all. After using it: 88% said they would use UCDC for their next project, 82% said it helped define business value, and most completed the canvas in under 5 minutes with minimal repetition.

The tool was easy to learn and it changed how students approached their projects. That was the goal.

Read the Full Paper

This paper is open access (CC BY 3.0), so you can read the full version freely:

Read the full paper: The use of User-centered Design Canvas for Rapid Prototyping →

Published in Journal of Physics: Conference Series (PVJ-ISComSET 2020) by IOP Publishing.