Editor’s note: This commentary is by Becky Colley, who is director of Creative & UX Strategy at Champlain College. It was first published on LinkedIn.
This spring, along with most of Vermont’s working class, I added a new side hustle to my UX portfolio. It wasn’t lucrative and came with lots of technical troubleshooting, defiance, and tears from students and teachers alike. My job title was something like UX & Creative Director Homeschool Teacher Mom Small Business Owner Wife Extraordinaire. Based on the information being released by Vermont school districts — the state with some of the lowest Covid-19 rates in the country — I’ll have that same title again this fall and my daughter may not learn to read as planned. Lucky us.
Those unfamiliar with User Experience (UX) Design might think it’s specific to websites and unrelated to back-to-school during Covid planning. But those with a true understanding of the field know that good UX design is about:
- Research (users, systems)
- Listening (ALL stakeholders)
- Flexible Planning (pivoting)
- Testing (role play)
- Measuring (defining metrics)
- Reiterating (fail fast, learn fast)
- Scaling (start small, scale quickly)
- Feedback Loops (qualitative and quantitative data sets)
- Communication
It’s about better understanding systems and how they are interconnected, how users interact with those systems, user behavior, taking small measured risks and finally, how to present findings and offer solutions to end users. None of this requires a website. All of it requires openness, collaboration and communication.
So as superintendents release statements riddled with complaints about their own leadership challenges, yet offer no path forward, I wonder how UX Design could have helped us this spring and summer because clearly we didn’t make much progress. Would we have engaged with and listened to the community? Collaborated with teachers and parents? Considered what the medical community advises? Better understood how people move through physical spaces and how those spaces should be altered in the Covid-19 era? Evaluated what systems and physical spaces we could quickly build or repurpose in order to meet our needs for fall? Determined what our youngest citizens are or are not capable of remotely? Defined the scale of barriers we must overcome and address them accordingly?
I don’t know what outcomes this research would have resulted in, but I can hypothesize it would have been more creative, safe, planned, inclusive and beneficial to our children and broader community. It’s clear that a bunch of administrators sitting in meetings consulting each other got us mostly nowhere. In this context, nowhere is defined as our state having some of the lowest Covid-19 rates in the nation, yet no clear plan of how we’ll keep kids physically in school and do so with the least amount of harm. What is being presented is not equitable and it is not accessible and therefore, it is not public school. It is not good design and sadly, will likely have grave consequences for our local economy.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t easy work, but that’s also why an objective expert should be doing it alongside administrators. I’m sure countless UX designers are up for this important and potentially life-saving challenge. It’s not too late. Reach out and we can find someone for the job.
