User Experience Design is a minor provided by CMD. CMD students can also follow this minor as 'themasemester'.   If your friends & family roll their eyes when you start another rant about how bad a particular app or machine is designed, you might be a good candidate for this minor programme.   Interactive products are a part of everyday life, and organizations use them to deliver products, services and information to customers, employees and other stakeholders. Consequently, today's user interface for products/services must be seen as a central part of the user experience offered by an organization. Poorly designed interfaces negatively affect the user experience, while a well-designed one can contribute to a positive experience with that organization.
The minor User Experience Design aims to help you design interfaces that provide a good user experience and positively contribute to the user’s experience of the organization that provides its products/services through the interface. Using simulations and real-world assignments, you will learn to research, understand and design solutions for complex user experience design problems at both a strategic level and at the user interface level. We build upon your existing knowledge of UX design and prepare you for designing for complex projects that touch multiple devices.

Video: https://vimeo.com/912921426

By the end of the minor, you:  

• have acquired the knowledge, skills and attitude of a junior UX designer
• can develop and create user centred concepts and solutions for complex UX design problems within given constraints
• master a variety of UXD skills and tools to design digital interactive media that are functional, reliable, usable and pleasurable in use
• are aware of and can deal with context factors that influence the design process: time, money, ethics, politics, strategy, technique, platform, etc.
• can document, present and effectively communicate complex UX solutions
• can test and evaluate the usability of interactive systems
• have developed your design attitude and an authentic vision of UXD
• have experienced and developed a feeling of what a professional setting of UX designers entails

* During this minor programme, we'll mainly cover the following bold competencies from the CMD programme:

1. Oriënteren en begrijpen
(Orienting and understanding)

2. Verbeelden en conceptualiseren
(Imagining and conceptualizing)

3. Uitwerken en prototyperen 
(Detailing and prototyping)

4. Evalueren
(Evaluate)

5. Samen ontwerpen
(Design together)

6. Georganiseerd en professioneel ontwerpen
Design in an organised and professional way)

7. Persoonlijk en geëngageerd ontwerpen
(Personal and committed designing)

8. Vakkundig en onderzoekend ontwerpen
(Competent and inquisitive design)

I'm a CMD student and want to follow this as a 'themasemester' minor:
There are no entrance requirements for HvA CMD students who are required to do this as a 'themasemester' as part of their study.

I'm a student from any programme that wants to follow this as a minor:
You must meet the entrance requirements from your programme to follow this minor. You can find those in the Teaching and Examination Regulations (OER) from your own programme. Priority is given to HvA CMD students who must complete a minor in S2.

⚠️ This minor is not an introduction to UX Design ⚠️
The programme is designed for students who already have followed courses about human-computer interaction, information architecture, design research & visual interface design. We build upon your existing UX Design knowledge during the courses.

  More specifically we have established the following entry requirements:

• You should write and speak good English and be able to read and understand university-level English texts quickly and thoroughly;
• You can develop personas, user scenarios, storyboards, visual presentations, concepts and debriefings;
• You have knowledge of user interface patterns, guidelines and heuristics
• You have knowledge of usability testing and are able to perform design research;
• You are able to work with UX design and prototyping tools like Sketch, Figma or ProtoPie
• You can develop/understand design specifications like user requirements, data models, use case scenarios, flowcharts, wireframes and wireflows;
• You can develop an interactive prototype with more advanced prototyping tools (like Figma, ProtoPie or in code)

Don't hesitate to contact us if you want to be sure that this minor meets your expectations and if your current coursework satisfies the entry requirements.

Please note that the minor is constantly updated and and you'll receive the final literature list at the start of the minor. To give you an idea, here's the literature list of one of the previous editions:

• Johnson, J. (2014). Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Guidelines (2nd ed.). Morgan Kaufmann.
• Park, C. W., & Alderman, J. (2018). Designing Across Senses: A Multimodal Approach to Product Design(1st ed.). O’Reilly Media.
• Spencer, D. (2010). A Practical Guide to Information Architecture. Five Simple Steps.
• Lupton, E. (2017). Design is Storytelling. New York, ABD: Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

Most materials (like books, articles and videos) are provided digitally with the exception of Designing with the Mind in Mind and Design is Storytelling.

During the minor theory-, workshop- and feedback sessions are provided. For most of the minor, you'll follow two courses at the same time that have two sessions each per week next to the coaching programme.

The exact schedule will be announced two weeks before the start of the minor via rooster.hva.nl.

Contact time:

The minor is fulltime and depending on the courses and projects the contact times differ.

On average the time per week for instructions/feedback is 15 h.

Act I: Chapters about User Experience, Multi Modal Design and Big Information Architecture
Act II: Chapters about Cognitive Psychology, Seductive Interaction Design and HCI Mastery

During both acts you'll:

1. work on your personal development as a designer together with a coach
2. work on a project for a client (either for a research group within the university or a company/organisation)
3. build an individual portfolio which we'll discuss during an assessment
4. receive 15EC after completing the assessment
   
   1 resit. 

If a student fails to successfully complete the minor in the period in which she took the minor it is possible to finalize the minor in a following period in which the minor is given.

If a minor is no longer offered or in case the minor is rewritten, the degree programme will offer students a further two opportunities to finalize this minor in the following year.

Questions about the minor?

Contact:

Vincent Vijn v.l.vijn@hva.nl and/or
Lia Sterkenburg c.sterkenburg@hva.nl 

Questions about the Kies op Maat-procedure?
Contact Tracy Hepp-Walker, info-cmd@hva.nl

Costs: Approximately €250 (for excursion and literature). Exact costs depend on the destination of the excursion, but we do our best to keep it affordable.

Note: There are 3 places available.
Applications will be processed in the order of receipt of signed learning agreements.