Last week, I spoke at a networking breakfast at the University of Michigan’s School of Information.  One of the questions that I was asked there was from someone who is in her first year of the program.  She wanted to know what UX courses were the most useful.

Your user experience coursework is the table stakes.  They’re necessary, but not sufficient, to be a good UX professional.  I won’t point to any of those courses as more or less useful.  Instead, it’s about what you get out of those courses: clear and concise communication, the ability to give constructive design criticism, the ability to take feedback (which won’t always be constructive criticism, but you still have to take it), the ability to juggle a changing schedule, the ability to handle multiple projects and deadlines.  An individual course isn’t make or break — and curricula change all the time, so a course that was useful to me when I got my degrees might not even be offered any longer.  Rather, the gestalt of what you learn during the process of getting your degrees is what will make you a great UX professional.

In many respects, the course that I use the most out of my three degrees is public speaking.  A lot of what I spend my time on isn’t really user experience work.  Instead, it’s communicating about user experience.  I communicate with my UX peers, program management, and application teams to understand what their research questions are.  I formulate a research plan, and then have to communicate that research plan to the stakeholders: why I’ve elected to do this kind of research, what results we can expect to get from this research.  Then there’s actually conducting the research, which isn’t so much about the tools that are used to collect the data (Morae, Excel, Camtasia, etc), but rather how my communication with the research participants as I collect that data.  A good user researcher guides, but does not bias, the participant as the researcher collects data to answer their questions.  After I’ve conducted the research, analyzed the results, and formulated my recommendations, my job is next to communicate the results and recommendations.  And throughout the software development lifecycle, aside from specific research that I have conducted, it’s my job to continue to communicate about previous user research that might be applicable to a given question, as well as general principles of good user experience.

Another unexpectedly useful course, this one from my undergrad, was a course called “statistics and society”.  It was about consuming data.  That course taught me a lot about how to think about data.  How does the method for collection impact the results?  How does the presentation of the data impact its analysis?  Neither this course nor my public speaking courses were required for my degrees, but I think that the skills that I learned in those courses are ones that help me be a great researcher.  I’m able to apply those skills very broadly, and they help me every single day.

Your UX coursework is the beginning.  If you don’t have good UX skills, you’re not going to get very far.  But your UX skills are not enough.  To grow in UX, you need to be great at more than just user experience.