News

The university design system is back!

Columbia University's Center for Usability and Experience Design welcomes 2023's summer intern.

 

New to User Experience (UX)? Here are some resources to get started.

 

You may see some new changes to our site but don't fret, providing an improved user centric experience is still core to our mission.

 

 

Christopher Yee joins Columbia University as it's newest Director of User Experience.

 

We’ve spent the last few issues going over the basics; now let’s dive into a specific best practice:  how to build trust and boost credibility. 

In the online world, targeting customers with appropriate messaging plays a crucial role in customer retention. Most of us at Columbia are not engaged in ecommerce, but retaining customers is an important part of the University missions of teaching, research, patient care, and public service. To put that another way, we need to keep faculty, staff, students, and the public coming back to our websites and applications to help fulfill Columbia’s mission. And so, we must establish credibility and build trust.

 

“I will check in with Bernard about UX.” I often hear about someone using my name when discussing a web or digital project in a meeting. While it’s great that people associate me with creating a better product, not every project needs to engage a user experience professional to perform user research or usability testing. Budgetary constraints, UX methodologies, and timelines often make this all but impossible anyway.

There are eight levels of UX maturity that organizations progress through, according to Nielsen Norman Group. Beginning with “hostility toward usability,” organizations maximize their ability to be responsive to user needs and demands only when they have built a user-driven culture after having fully adopted user experience principles.

 

“With great power comes great responsibility.” As UX superheroes, we must master three primary soft skills--curiosity, empathy, and critical thinking--to defend against bad design and inattention to user experience. We protect and advocate for users, especially when they are not present in meetings.

Welcome to the UX Corner. The Center of Excellence for Usability and Experience Design is partnering with Talent Services and the Office of the Communication and Public Affairs to bring you the latest updates, fun facts, best practices, and guidelines on user experience.