Photo credit: Jessica Ivins
In part 1 of this series, I encouraged you to determine your goals before committing to a graduate school program. In part 2 below, I share what I’ve learned from speaking with HCI program graduates.
From the Mouths of HCI Graduates
When writing this article, I realized that I had many unanswered questions about HCI graduate school programs. What is the HCI graduate school experience like? How do HCI programs prepare (or not prepare) students for their careers? Are graduates able to apply what they learned in school when they land jobs in the industry?
To answer these questions, I spoke with some of my colleagues in the field who earned master’s degrees in HCI.
Lee Gingras, UX Program Manager
Lee Gingras is a UX program manager at LiquidPlanner in Seattle. She graduated from University of Michigan in 2009 with a master’s degree in HCI.
I met Lee at the Midwest UX Conference in 2012, where she gave a presentation about UX apprenticeships. In that presentation, Lee urged the audience of UX designers to offer UX apprenticeships at their organizations. Lee felt that apprenticeships were the best way for aspiring UX designers to gain experience.
During the presentation, Lee said the projects in her master’s degree program didn’t fully prepare her for the UX industry. One of her assignments in graduate school was: “Design an app that inspires social change.”
I agree with Lee. I can see how projects like these wouldn’t prepare students for the industry. UX designers tackle specific design challenges with defined constraints. I can’t imagine a client or product manager asking you to solve a nebulous problem like “inspire social change.”
Recently, I asked Lee to tell me more about her graduate school projects. Lee told me:
[The university] did the best they could to give projects with real stakeholders. There were no [project] constraints… the sky was the the limit. As design students, we were working together to design a theoretical thing. There were no realistic implementation challenges or budget constraints. We didn’t even cover soft skills.
When Lee graduated, she realized that she wasn’t prepared to work with clients:
I did a few contracts where I was the only designer. I felt so lost. I didn’t have the skills to know what constraints were. I didn’t have the skills to be client-facing. We didn’t do any client projects in grad school. Getting on the phone with a client and defending your design with someone who’s not a professor—that was really scary.
However, Lee went on to say that her internship experience was invaluable:
The best part of the program was that I had a few internships. Internships gave me an idea of the job I wanted. They gave me an idea of how to look for something that would be a good environment for me. I wanted a job where I had people I could learn from. I didn’t want a job where I was going to be the only UX person or the first UX person.
Lee also said she was lucky to land a full-time position at an organization that trained her:
I got lucky. I was hired out of school by Christina York. We worked together at Ithaka. Christina is very smart, and she was an excellent mentor. I learned all my soft skills from her. She taught me practical, real-life UX. She knew I just came out of school. She knew I didn’t have all the capabilities. She hired me knowing that.
Alla Zollers, UX Coach
Alla Zollers is a leadership coach and UX designer in Oakland, CA. In 2005, Alla earned her master’s degree in HCI from Indiana University Bloomington.
“I didn’t learn very much in grad school that helped me. I learned everything on the job,” Alla told me. “I literally learned it on the job. I made a lot of errors. Then I read a lot of blogs like A List Apart and Boxes and Arrows. I figured it out.”
Like many people, Alla struggled to learn soft skills once she was working in the industry:
The biggest challenge for me was interpersonal skills. It’s taken me years to figure out how to work well, how to communicate, and what battles to pick. Academia doesn’t prepare you for that.
I asked Alla, “If you could go back and do it all over again, would you go to grad school? Or would you do something else?”
I would get an internship and start building a portfolio. I have interns now who are in college. I tell them to do projects for free. I tell them, ‘Do projects for your cousin or your aunt. Do all the steps of the project, document it, and build it out. Do the research, do the IA [information architecture], and iterate on it. Do it in your spare time.’
Like me, Alla’s a big fan of reading UX books to learn the craft. “Read all the UX books you can,” Alla said. “They’re practical. They’re out there.”
Lee and Alla didn’t feel fully prepared for industry challenges when they graduated. Kaarin Hoff and Whitney Hess, however, talked about how their graduate school experiences paved the way for their careers.
Kaarin Hoff, Information Architect
Kaarin Hoff is an information architect at The Understanding Group (TUG) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She earned her master’s in HCI from the School of Information at University of Michigan in 2013.
Kaarin spoke very highly of what she learned in her graduate school program and of the people she met in the program:
School is an amazing opportunity to be committed and immersed. You’re surrounded by all these people who are equally nerdy and obsessed. You get to talk for hours about amazing subjects. I was surrounded by people making this a priority in their life. It was a huge blessing.
I asked Kaarin what skills she learned in graduate school that she applies on the job. “I learned user research, usability testing, and all sorts of best practices,” she said. “Best practices were baked into every class.”
Kaarin learned many other things that she still applies on the job. “I learned how your eyes move through the page and how your brain works fundamentally. I use those things every day.”
Kaarin landed a UX job through the HCI program. Dan Klyn, who works with Kaarin at TUG, teaches an Information Architecture course that Kaarin took while she was a student. Kaarin interned at TUG, and before she graduated, TUG offered Kaarin a full-time job.
Whitney Hess, User Experience Coach
Whitney Hess is a user experience coach and personal development coach in San Diego, CA. Whitney earned her master’s in HCI from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004.
Whitney and I were unable to coordinate an interview while I was working on this article. However, Whitney talked about her graduate school experience in her interview with the The UX Intern podcast in February 2014.
Wesley Noble, host of The UX Intern podcast, asked Whitney what she got out of her graduate degree program. Whitney responded:
Everything. I got everything out of it. Yes, it is totally possible and very likely to have a successful career in this field without a formal education. The vast, vast majority of people in user experience don’t have some kind of HCI background or related education.
Whitney went on to say what made her experience so valuable:
I was able to do projects in the ideal way… in an academic environment, not with all the business constraints, with a tremendous amount of freedom and support.
I [learned] a certain way of thinking about the work we do, a certain philosophy that underpins why we care so much about taking care of our customers, and why we care so much about an iterative design process. The why behind all of it just really got drilled in. That has supported me in all of the work that I’ve done since.
Whitney explained how her graduate school experience prepared her for her career:
Even though I didn’t have any experience when I graduated from school, when I was in my first job, I had that philosophy. I knew what my purpose was. And I totally attribute that to Carnegie Mellon’s HCI program.
What are Your Goals?
Some of the UX designers I interviewed have mixed feelings about their graduate school experience. Others said that graduate school was a tremendous experience that laid the foundation for their careers.
Like I said in part 1, determine your goal, then ask yourself if graduate school is your best path for achieving that goal. If you decide to pursue grad school, ask hard questions about whether or not an HCI program will help you meet your goal.
Be sure to compare graduate school options to other options. See my other post, My Advice for Becoming a UX Designer, for my suggestions on landing a job in UX design.
Disclaimer: I’m a faculty member at Center Centre, a vocational school that prepares students to be industry-ready UX designers. Some of Center Centre’s student applicants also apply to HCI graduate programs.
Hi
I liked this piece..I recently wrote about my experience in graduate school for Interaction Design. I think the benefit of graduate school is to make you do several projects (and one big project at the end, if your school does a thesis)..and, honestly, it is a credential. Jane Jacobs wrote that universities are in the business of providing credentials, not necessarily an education; as far as this is true of the larger body in which you study, this will be to some degree true in the department. You can do your own projects without graduate school, but credentialing in any field becomes a new era…with many having a credential of some kind, not having one becomes more problematic. I always tell people to go if they would learn about the subject anyway, and if they have the money/time luxury of going (for most, the notion of doing school only is an arcadia, and the balance of work and school can be tough). I do hope the field continues to recognize skill and talent outside of formal education; I think over credentialing the field would not be a good move.
Thanks for your comment, Michael. I have a feeling that our field will continue to recognize skills and experience outside of formal education. Design evolves too quickly for traditional education to keep up. 🙂
Great insights as usual, Jess! As a master’s recipient myself, I agree that getting a graduate degree generally doesn’t seem to provide directly applicable UX skills — though it also really depends on the graduate program. I will say if you’re doing a graduate degree that involves a major final project or thesis (as mentioned by Michael), there’s a ton of value in experiencing the rigor of academic research that goes with it — which is actually quite applicable to user-centered design projects that involve ethnographic research or usability testing.
Howdy, Matt! You’re right—each graduate program is different. I think it comes back to your goals and whether or not the program meets them. I didn’t realize you went to grad school for UX design!
I did the grad program at Bloomsburg University in Instructional Design — a very near neighbor or perhaps even child to UX Design. It’s a sub-discipline of HCI, and basically the field of study focused on computer-based learning. I chose the program for its reputation, but also because it allowed me to focus on what I wanted to learn/explore in the form of a graduate thesis. Being an interaction designer, I narrowed down my thesis to exploring the performance differences between mouse-based and touchscreen interaction — relevant to UX/IxD and ID.
Though to be fair, I was fortunate enough to already be a full-time UX/IxD practitioner while going through the program.
Matt, I’d love to hear what you took away from the program. How would you compare what you learned in the program to what you’ve done as a practitioner?
I’m a student in Iowa State’s HCI program and can say that there are many aspects of Experience Design that come into play that I may have never considered had I not decided to get first a Certificate and then a full M.S. The thing that sticks out to me most are the human factors involved and the cognitive psychology of HCI. I think the fundamental understanding I’ve gained about how human minds work in context of machine use and under certain conditions, as well as what the physical constraints of certain devices that provide limitations, things like affordances and so on, have become underlying principals for every experience I’ve designed. I also think that, which many others here have said, the opportunity to learn technique within academic rigor and the ability to test freely to the fullest extent has been really helpful for me.
Joshua, thanks for the comment! Learning how human minds work in context of machine use sounds fascinating. I’m also glad to hear that you find value in academic rigor and the ability to test freely.
This is an incredibly helpful series, thank you!! I will be attending an HCI master’s program in the fall and am excited to be expanding my skill set and venturing into UX design. However, I’m torn between two of the programs mentioned above, and I’m wondering: Do recruiters care as much about pedigree as people keep saying? I’ve been told a few times that graduates from one school (CMU) are favored over grads from the other (UMSI) due to the more specifically HCI/technical nature of the program. However, I’ve also been told that thought process and a strong portfolio can be more important. I’m excited about both programs, but want to be sure I can get my foot in the door at larger companies on one of the coasts. Do you have any advice?
Hi Sarah! I’m not privy to what schools, if any, hiring managers favor.
I would ask to speak with graduates of both programs. See what jobs they landed. See if they’ve kept those jobs. Ask how the program prepared or didn’t prepare them for their jobs.
If you have contacts at any of the large companies you’d like to work for, ask them if they attended grad school programs. Ask them if their hiring managers prefer one program to the other.
At the end of the day, most hiring managers care about whether or not you can do the work. This seems to matter more than coursework and academic experience. As you research these programs, focus on how industry-ready you’ll be upon graduation.
I hope this helps!
Sarah, I’m also curious about your comment, “I’ve been told a few times that graduates from one school (CMU) are favored over grads from the other (UMSI) due to the more specifically HCI/technical nature of the program.”
I’m less interested in what schools they’re discussing and more interested in where you’re hearing these comments. Are you hearing things from UX hiring managers? Are you hearing things from UX designers? Are you hearing things from the schools themselves?
No need to name names. I’m just curious as to where you’re hearing this info. Thanks!
I just signed up for the Bloc ux designer career track. I’ve looked at grad schools and just couldn’t justify the expense – I just want an affordable track faster than completely rudderless self-education. My current career is unrelated (banking/commercial real estate), but my undergrad was anthropology. When I graduated in the 90s, I wanted to develop educational websites for museums, but that was way before this whole UX thing exploded. I’m hoping I can land an internship/job as soon as I’m done. I have project management experience with my current job. Maybe that will be enough with an online apprenticeship and a few workable apps/pages? Fingers crossed!
Best of luck to you, Michelle. I completely understand your concern about the cost of grad school. I also haven’t heard of Bloc’s program. I’ll check it out.
Hello Jessica,
Thank you very much for this excellent article, it does helps a lot!
I have a bachelor degree of Landscape Architecture, worked in the field in the past 2 years. I’ve always have a thought to build a new career path of UI/UX design since graduation, but I have no clue about how to start it, since I don’t have any background in computer science. Not sure in this situation, should I give up my current job and get myself into a Master-HCI program; or maybe take some web development and coding classes at local community collage or online courses, and start from there?
Hi Jun. Thanks for your comment. It really depends on your goals and your personal situation.
What do you want your career to look like? Do you want to be a UX designer or a front-end developer? If you want to be a front-end developer, you’ll take a much different path than you would to become a UX designer. Research your options thoroughly and make sure they are right for your goals.
Hi Jessica,
I’m currently looking into attending the MicroMasters program University of Michigan offers through edX.
I’m doing this so I can hopefully gain admission to the program.
This article (both parts) has made me question the necessity of this route…
Regardless, my question is actually totally unrelated to that.
Do you know if the HCI program they offered is now the User Experience Designer career pathway?
I can’t find the HCI program anywhere.
Jason,
Thanks for your comment! I’m not familiar with University of Michigan’s MicroMasters program. I would contact the program directly if you have questions. Good luck!
What excellent advice, Jessica! Thanks for getting me on the right foot. It sounds like self-teaching is my best option due to the wealth of resources available online. But if I find it too taxing, I’ll go to grad school for the community support. And no matter what, it sounds like a good option to go eventually due to the philosophy it can teach that can upgrade you as a designer.